Elon Musk announced the expansion of Tesla’s Robotaxi service with yet another lame joke as the electric car manufacturer continues to struggle through the “most important year” in its history.
After years of declining sales spurred on by increased competition in the EV sector and the growing toxicity of Musk’s personal brand, Tesla has bet the farm on its self-driving taxi service to turn the company’s ailing fortunes around.
Last month saw the long-awaited rollout of the Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, which scored Musk an increasingly rare PR win after things managed not to go catastrophically wrong in the small test area, which was available only to Tesla stock owners and required a Tesla employee with their finger on a kill-switch button at all times.
Twenty-two days after the initial launch, Robotaxi announced it was expanding its service area on Monday, posting a picture of an area of downtown Austin shaped like a penis captioned with the phrase “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.”
“Just expanded our surface area…” the official Robotaxi account tweeted. “We’re big eggplant fans!”
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger pic.twitter.com/t7grvsIJKg
— Tesla Robotaxi (@robotaxi) July 14, 2025
Musk, never one to pass up the opportunity to showcase his juvenile sense of humor, quote-tweeted the image of the phallic geofence shortly afterwards and wrote “Bigger, longer and uncut” accompanied by a laughing emoji in an apparent reference to the South Park movie.
There appears to be no practical reason to cover this specific area of Austin, other than to satisfy Musk’s childish impulses. The Tesla CEO appears to have gotten the idea from an X user named Steven Ryan Mark, who drew a crude outline of a penis over an overlay of Austin and wrote “Tesla has an [sic] chance to do the funniest thing with the first Robotaxi service area expansion,” back in June, which Musk responded to with a picture of a chef kiss.
Bigger, longer and uncut 😂 https://t.co/VmAfkdndMI
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 14, 2025
Tesla has also priced Robotaxi rides at $4.20, the “weed number,” for seemingly no reason other than to indulge Musk’s immature sense of humor.
Regardless of the intent, Musk appeared to be enjoying the fruits of his latest “joke,” tweeting “And they take themselves so seriously” in response to a user laughing at the media being “forced” to print a picture of the phallic geoscape.
Tesla is currently facing a slew of problems, including the biggest drop in sales in the company’s history and plunging stock prices largely fueled by the brand damage Musk has done to the company following his foray into politics. January saw him describe 2025 as “maybe the most important” Tesla has ever faced.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 26, 2025
“We believe this is a tipping point in the Tesla story and ultimately the Tesla Board needs to act now and set the ground rules for Musk going forward around his political ambitions and actions,” said Dan Ives, tech analyst at Wedbush Securities, in a note to clients this week.
“Tesla is heading into one of the most important stages of its growth cycle with the autonomous and robotics future now on the doorstep and cannot have Musk spending more and more time creating a political party which will require countless time, energy, and political capital,” he added.
Musk, meanwhile, responded to Ives’ suggestion simply by tweeting “Shut up Dan” in response to a post of his on X.
Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki, a major investor in Tesla, told CNN he doesn’t believe Musk wants to be in the auto industry anymore, hence the company’s pivot to robotics and automated cars.
“He doesn’t want to be in the car business anymore,” said Gerber. “He knows that everybody hates him. So, he thinks, ‘Let’s just focus on this robotaxi business and making robots, because if I put a big shiny object in front of people, they’ll be distracted from the reality that Tesla has real problems and I don’t have a solution for them.’”
Yet despite the growing frustration with Musk from both the public and his business associates, it seems unlikely that anyone with any oversight is planning on holding him accountable any time soon.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Gerber added.
The post Musk Makes Another Juvenile Joke Out of His Plot to Save Tesla appeared first on The Daily Beast.
