According to Gary Black, Tesla’s future growth depends on selling unsupervised autonomy and humanoid robots, making marketing a mission-critical lever for adoption and monetization. Source: Gary Black on X, Jan 3, 2026. He argues TSLA currently lacks the marketing muscle to compete with GOOGL, AMZN, BIDU and other tech-savvy firms that excel at educating mass-market consumers on AI product benefits, creating execution risk for Tesla’s AI-driven revenue streams. Source: Gary Black on X, Jan 3, 2026. He adds that autonomous ride-hailing is already crowded and that the personal robots category will become crowded once a dozen manufacturers solve unsupervised autonomy, so TSLA must invest in broad advertising and communications to differentiate rather than rely on word-of-mouth. Source: Gary Black on X, Jan 3, 2026. He cites Apple’s iPhone as a case where strong advertising mattered, implying that without great advertising Tesla could struggle to scale consumer adoption of AI offerings. Source: Gary Black on X, Jan 3, 2026. For traders, Black frames marketing execution as a key catalyst and risk to TSLA’s relative positioning versus mega-cap AI platforms and to the timeline of autonomy and robot monetization. Source: Gary Black on X, Jan 3, 2026. He did not mention cryptocurrencies or crypto tokens in this analysis. Source: Gary Black on X, Jan 3, 2026.