Only 10 Robotaxis hit the road, and Elon Musk's net worth slightly increased by 100 billion yuan.

Nearly 10 years ago, Elon Musk introduced the concept of the self-driving taxi, Robotaxi, for the first time when Tesla released "Master Plan Part Deux".

Since then, Musk has made repeated promises but also missed multiple deadlines. The Robotaxi has been slow to launch, while Waymo, a subsidiary of Google, has been operating 250,000 rides per week.

On June 22nd local time, the Robotaxi finally hit the road. However, this is far from the one million vehicles promised in 2019 - there are only 10 to 20 vehicles, and they are only operating within a small area in Austin, Texas. A small number of invited users can take a test ride, paying a fixed fee of $4.20 per trip. Currently, there is a Tesla employee sitting in the front passenger seat of all Robotaxis.

Although the first step of the Robotaxi was taken very cautiously, the market immediately gave a positive response - Tesla's stock price rose by 9% in a single day, and Musk's personal wealth increased by $15 billion.

Who else can draw grand plans for 10 years, finally deliver a small part, and still receive a positive market response? It's hard to think of anyone other than Musk.

But over the past 10 years, the industry has changed significantly. The road ahead for the Robotaxi is long, and Tesla still has a long way to go.

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What's it like to take a Tesla Robotaxi? Users who were lucky enough to receive an invitation can't wait to share videos.

Some of the fans mentioned that Tesla held a briefing before, explaining in detail the rules of the system - including that the in-car cameras and microphones will continuously monitor passengers during the ride. Invited fans can bring one additional passenger, but each ride is limited to 2 passengers.

To book a Robotaxi, users must download a separate app (different from Tesla's regular app) and install it through Apple's TestFlight Beta testing protocol.

After installation, as long as users are within the service area, a car will come to pick them up. If the destination selected by the user is outside the service area, the app will try to stop near the edge of the service area and inform the user how far they need to walk to reach the destination.

The area currently covered by the Robotaxi is approximately 13 kilometers by 8 kilometers, which is smaller than the area covered by Waymo in Austin.

The ordering interface and experience are very similar to taking an Uber. After successfully placing an order, users can see the Robotaxi on the map as it approaches. After the vehicle arrives and stops, users can find it according to the location, take a seat, fasten their seat belts, and the vehicle will automatically recognize and prepare to start.

The driver's seat of the taxi is indeed empty, while there is a Tesla staff member in the front passenger seat. In this way, the staff can assist passengers and stop the vehicle in an emergency at any time, without actually ruining the "driverless" scene.

In all the videos, the Tesla employees in the front passenger seat always keep their hands on the door handles, indicating that they may use the door release device as an emergency stop switch or something similar.

In addition, there is a "Support" button on the rear screen, and remote personnel can also intervene to control the vehicle.

Overall, users who have experienced the Robotaxi have given positive feedback.

Some users have experienced driving over speed bumps and down slopes in the vehicle, and the driving process was very smooth.

When some users arrived at Starbucks in the vehicle, they encountered a human driver parked in the middle of the parking lot. After a moment of hesitation, the Robotaxi decided to reverse into a parking space so that the driver could get out. Some users were also amazed at how the Robotaxi made multiple turns to exit a narrow parking lot.

When getting off the vehicle, the system will display a button to open the trunk and instructions on how to open the doors. Tesla owners should know that new drivers often have trouble finding the button to open the doors inside the car, so these instructions are very useful.

Finally, at the end of the journey, users can rate the trip and even leave a "tip"... but in fact, it's not like that: when users click the tip button, they will see a screen that says "Just kidding!" - a typical Musk-style joke.

However, there was also a "problem moment". During the first test ride of the Robotaxi by Tesla Daily, the Tesla car hesitated when trying to turn left at an intersection, then continued driving, and drove in the oncoming lane for some time before re-entering the left-turn lane ahead.

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June 22nd, 2025, was a good day for Elon Musk.

Ashok Elluswamy, the director of Autopilot/AI at Tesla, posted a photo of the "war room" for the Tesla monitoring press conference. The screen showed that as of the release, 112 test rides had been completed, covering a total distance of 499 miles (803 kilometers), with an average test ride distance of about 4 miles (about 6.5 kilometers, which is roughly the maximum distance that can be traveled within the current small service area).

"Congratulations to @Tesla_AI and the chip design team on successfully launching the Robotaxi! This is the culmination of a decade of hard work. The AI chip and software teams were both created from scratch within Tesla." Musk posted on X (formerly Twitter).

In addition, he also retweeted several messages, such as the praise from invited users, a group photo posted by employees in which Musk was holding his hands up and giving a thumbs up, or a video of himself talking about the Robotaxi in the past.

The self-driving taxi has finally launched, and the market quickly gave a positive response to Tesla.

Tesla's stock price rose 9% on Monday to $27, closing at a three-week high of $349.

Musk's net worth also increased accordingly. Musk owns 13% of Tesla's outstanding shares and an additional 9% in equity. On Monday, his net worth increased by $15 billion.

Although he has lost $47.5 billion since the beginning of 2025, he still ranks first on the global billionaire list.

As of Tuesday morning, Musk's wealth is $139 billion more than that of Mark Zuckerberg, the second-richest person in the world and the founder of Meta, and $155 billion more than that of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.

Many of the users who were invited to take a test ride in the Tesla Robotaxi are die-hard Tesla fans. Their excited reactions are a reflection of many Tesla fans and shareholders - they have been waiting for a long time.

Musk has been making grand promises about self-driving taxis for many years.

There is a "List of Elon Musk's Predictions for Tesla's Self-Driving Cars" on Wikipedia, which lists 21 specific time-bound promises made by Musk and indicates whether they have been fulfilled. He failed to fulfill 19 of them, which are all marked in an unappealing red.

For example, Musk stated in 2019: "Next year, we will definitely have over one million self-driving taxis on the road." Now, Musk has indeed deployed up to 20 self-driving taxis on the roads of Austin, Texas - five years later than expected and at least 999,981 vehicles short of the promise.

But the amazing thing is that despite the slow progress of his projects, Musk has still become the name most closely associated with "self-driving taxis". The American online magazine Slate commented sharply on this:

It now seems that Musk's repeated promotion of Tesla's self-driving taxi future has paid off to some extent. He spent so many years building expectations but failed to deliver, so any substantial progress in the self-driving car field seems like a breakthrough. No one else can be so closely associated with self-driving cars while having contributed so little to getting them on the road.

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Amid the excitement, the future of Tesla's Robotaxi still needs time to be proven.

The number of Tesla's first batch of self-driving cars is far from Musk's goal of "tens of thousands" of self-driving cars by 2026, and even fewer than the approximately 100 self-driving cars that Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has been operating in Austin since March. It's also worth noting that Tesla's first batch of robot taxis are Model Ys, not the specially designed Cybercab that Tesla introduced last year.

Musk has not given a clear timeline for the Cybercab, and Wall Street's reaction has not been enthusiastic.

Tom Narayan of the Royal Bank of Canada said: "Based on our conversations with investors, the feedback is basically neutral. Only time will tell if this really works."

Some other analysts have warned that although Tesla's vision for self-driving taxis is appealing, its success depends on overcoming significant obstacles in terms of safety, operational infrastructure, sensor limitations, and actual deployment - all of which have yet to be proven.

An obvious problem is that Tesla already has competitors in the self-driving taxi market. According to Reuters, Waymo, a subsidiary of Google, has been operating over 250,000 rides per week and launched a paid service in 2018.

It should be noted that Tesla's Robotaxi has a very different technical approach from its competitors. Competitors use a redundant perception system of LiDAR, cameras, and millimeter-wave radar and rely heavily on high-precision maps. In contrast, Tesla has chosen a pure vision-based solution, which has been controversial.

The current Tesla Robotaxi has strict operating time restrictions and requires good weather conditions (it will stop operating in bad weather). It remains to be seen whether it can handle different cities, regions, time periods, and weather conditions in the future.

In addition, compliance issues have always been the most difficult hurdle for self-driving taxis.

As Tesla's robot taxis hit the road, Texas lawmakers quickly took action to establish basic rules for this emerging industry. Last Friday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a new law requiring companies to obtain a state-issued license to operate self-driving cars. The law will take effect on September 1st, reflecting a bipartisan attitude of carefully regulating self-driving technology while allowing innovation to progress under strict supervision.

Philip Koopman, a computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in self-driving technology, said in an interview with Reuters: "This is just the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end." He pointed out that even if Tesla's pilot project in Austin is successful, it may take years or even decades to promote the robot taxi service in major cities.

Musk hasn't stopped making grand promises. On X, he retweeted a video of his speech at the Tesla shareholders' meeting last June, saying that the Robotaxi will be the Airbnb on wheels in the future - it would be great if car owners could let their cars go out and earn money while they sleep.

However, the road ahead is long. From 10 to one million Robotaxis on the road, from having an