The idea of Tesla making a phone has been floating around for years and it’s now resurfaced following comments made by CEO Elon Musk.
Musk held a string of October town hall talks in Pennsylvania as part of his support for Donald Trump’s presidency bid, and the subject of a phone was raised at the October 18 event.
“That’s a lot of work. The idea of making a phone makes me want to die,” Musk said. “But if we have to make a phone, we will, but we will aspire not to make a phone.”
Musk says the reasoning for making a phone would hinge on his claim the likes of Google and Apple have an overbearing approach.
“The various companies, Apple and Google Android, have to make sure they don’t have a heavy hand in the App Store and whatnot, or they will create a forcing function for there to be a competitor.”
Musk has made similar statements in the past. In November 2023, during a New York Times event, Musk said “if there’s an essential need to make a phone, I’ll make a phone, but I’ve got a lot of fish to fry.”
These rumours resurfaced in June 2024, following the announcement of Apple Intelligence.
“If Apple actually integrates woke nanny AI spyware into their OS, we might need to do that,” Musk wrote on X in reply to one user who said the tech magnate should develop a “Grok phone with Grok integrated.”
Grok is the AI chatbot of the X social media platform. Musk is at risk of veering into hypocritical territory here, as X users’ posts are harvested as training data for the chatbot, outside Europe, unless they opt out.
“Either stop this creepy spyware or all Apple devices will be banned from the premises of my companies,” Musk posted in response to Tim Cook’s own X post on June 10 regarding the launch of Apple Intelligence.
Musk’s suggestion he might tell one of his companies to come up with a phone is part of his characteristic bravado-heavy reactions to developments he does not like in tech.
From another technology executive, claims like these could usually be dismissed. But a not dissimilar reaction led to Musk’s £41 billion acquisition of Twitter, since rebranded as X.
Musk reportedly planned to back out of that deal, before realising doing so would open him up to both a $1 billion fee and the potential to be sued for a far greater figure in other losses.
What would a Tesla phone look like?
Is a phone with Tesla or X branding feasible? The project would probably use the AOSP framework, which is the basic skeleton of Android minus many of the parts that make it appealing, including the Google Play app store and Google’s suite of apps. It’s used in Amazon’s Fire tablets, for example, and the Meta Quest headsets. This would leave the Tesla or X team with the responsibility of creating an app store, core apps for email, web browsing and so on. And for designing the software’s interface.
Losing all that Google gloss, which separates an AOSP-based phone from a full-on Google Android one, is a big part of what turned Huawei phones from some of the best around in 2019, to devices hard to recommend to almost anyone in the UK.
There’s a cautionary tale from the past here too. Amazon attempted to break into the smartphone market in 2014, with the Fire Phone. It was based on AOSP, and had four face-tracking cameras on the front to let it produce a 3D-like effect when you looked at it from different angles.
The launch was a disaster, despite Amazon having already made Android tablets for three years at this point. It reportedly sold as few as 35,000 units, and Amazon had upwards of £60 million in unsold stock two years after its launch in 2016.
One of the key factors in its failure was the limited software library available through the Amazon Appstore, a criticism that can still be levelled at it today as the app portal for Amazon’s Fire tablets.
A phone’s costs aren’t limited to its manufacturing either as huge amounts of money are required to market phones and other gadgets. Apple and Samsung both spend billions of dollars a year on marketing.
Meanwhile, Musk has stripped back the staff of X since its acquisition to reduce operating costs, at one point by 80%. It’s not hard to understand why Musk is so reluctant to commit to a Tesla or X phone even though some fans seem so keen on making it a reality.
