• Apple CEO Tim Cook  has been at the helm since 2011.
• Cook's tenure has produced valuable lessons that managers and execs can use to improve.
• He's taken Apple to new heights by asking questions, sticking to his values, and more.

Tim Cook has been Apple's CEO since 2011, and he's led the tech giant to major milestones and through tough times.

An Alabama native, Cook is known for his mild manners and relatively private life outside work, but he's maintained his leadership position at Apple for 13 years and become an iconic name.

It hasn't been easy. Apple has faced increasing competition in recent years and, mostly recently, European Union fines and an ongoing antitrust lawsuit from the Department of Justice.

Still, Cook has seen the company through major releases such as the Vision Pro headset and the launch of Apple Intelligence this year alone.

Here are five things managers and CEOs can do to run their companies like the 63-year-old Apple chief.

Lead with your values

When Cook addressed the graduating class of Gallaudet University in 2022, he gave them a key piece of career advice.

"I have one important piece of advice I want to share, so important that it's the only piece of advice I'm going to share today. And that is this: Whatever you do, lead with your values," he told students during his commencement speech.

Cook continued, "By leading with your values, what I mean is that you should make decisions big and small, each and every day, based on a deep understanding of who you are and what you believe."

Know the difference between prepared and ready

In another commencement speech — this time to students at Stanford University — Cook spoke about taking over at Apple after its cofounder Steve Jobs took medical leave and later died in 2011.

He said he "learned the real, visceral difference between preparation and readiness" when Jobs was "truly gone" and added that it was a lonely time for him.

"Your mentors may leave you prepared, but they can't leave you ready."

Ask questions

Cook is known for putting his employees in the hot seat.

In the book "Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level" by Leander Kahney, it's said that asking employees questions is a management tactic Cook uses often.

Kahney wrote that Cook could "wear people down through an endless barrage of questions." According to the book, the Apple CEO did this to ensure workers had a deep understanding of whatever they were tasked with doing.

"He's a very quiet leader," Greg Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, told Kahney, according to the book. "Not a screamer, not a yeller," he said, adding: "He's just very calm, steady, but will slice you up with questions. You better know your stuff."

Don't worry about a "legacy"

Although Cook hasn't offered this as advice, his opinion on legacies seems to differ from that of other high-powered CEOs.

In a 2024 interview with the tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, Cook said he hadn't thought much about his legacy because it's "something that is defined by other people."

He's also made peace with the inevitable end of his tenure as the head of Apple and the beginning of another CEO's legacy.

"At some point, there will be another CEO," Cook said. "And my whole focus in life will be on making them successful."

Keep your finger on the pulse

Cook has said he spends each morning reading hundreds of employee and customer feedback emails to learn more about how Apple can improve.

For him, it's a way to "stay grounded in terms of what the community is feeling," he told the singer Dua Lipa in November. In past interviews, Cook has said he receives about 800 emails daily and reads most of them.

"I read emails from a lot of customers and employees, and the customers are telling me things that they love about us or things that they want changed about us," he said. "Employees are giving me ideas."

• Ukraine has used naval drones and missiles to wage war against Russia's Black Sea Fleet.
• A campaign of highly effective strikes has pushed Moscow to relocate many of its vulnerable assets.
• Satellite imagery captures the exodus of Russian naval assets from Crimea to other ports.

Armed with exploding naval drones and long-range missiles, Ukraine has managed to push Russia's Black Sea Fleet away from its long-held headquarters in the occupied Crimean peninsula to other bases far away.

A series of high-profile Ukrainian attacks on the port of Sevastopol and Russian warships last year trigged the withdrawal of Russian warships to bases in the port cities of Feodosia, on the other side of Crimea, and Novorossiysk, in Russia, as Moscow sought better protection for its naval assets.

Newly released satellite imagery captured by BlackSky, a real-time, space-based intelligence company, and obtained by Business Insider reveals the dispersal of the Black Sea Fleet — one of Ukraine's defining successes of the war. Kyiv, lacking a proper navy of its own, has inflicted shocking losses on Russian warships and, in the process, opened up a crucial maritime corridor to help support its economy.

Ukraine has relied on its fleet of homemade naval drones and missiles to sink, destroy, or damage at least 24 Russian vessels in the Black Sea, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said last week.

These attacks span the entirety of the war, but the exodus of the Black Sea Fleet didn't really kick into gear until September 2023. That month, Ukraine carried out two separate attacks on Sevastopol using Western-made cruise missiles to bombard a key shipyard and the fleet's headquarters.

The British defense ministry noted in October that the increasing threats to Sevastopol — as evidenced by the earlier strikes on the shipyard and headquarters — were likely forcing Moscow to disperse its naval operations across the Black Sea and away from Crimea's battered western coast.

BlackSky said it generated tens of thousands of automated detections of military vessels between January 2022 and April 2024, giving it insight into the scale of the Russian withdrawal.

In the months after the Sevastopol strikes, BlackSky found that there was an 18% drop in detections in the port.

Meanwhile, it recorded a 23% increase in detections in Feodosia and a 22% increase in detections in Novorossiysk — just shy of 100 miles and just over 200 miles away from Sevastopol, respectively. These figures underscore a noteworthy departure away from western Crimea to other locations that may be harder for Ukrainian missiles and drones to reach.

A series of satellite images captured in the months before and after the damaging Sevastopol strikes further highlights the Black Sea Fleet's dwindling presence at the city's port, as warships were distributed across the region to Feodosia and Novorossiysk.

BlackSky also said it observed an increase in apparent maritime security measures at the entrances to the ports where Russian vessels were docked, including at Sevastopol despite the decrease in naval activity there. Western intelligence and analysts have identified these defenses as netting, floating booms, and moored barges.

With a diminished presence of Russian warships around Sevastopol and Crimea's western coast, Ukraine in recent weeks has resorted to attacks on smaller vessels like patrol vessels and tugboats in a bid to continue inflicting naval losses on Moscow.

The Black Sea fight has been a bright spot for Ukraine amid the slow-moving campaign on the ground. Russia has been unable to consistently defend against this innovative and asymmetrical style of warfare, and officials in Kyiv have vowed to press on with this highly effective campaign of missile and naval drone attacks.

A general in the Security Service of Ukraine, which has carried out naval drone attacks on Russian warships and infrastructure, previously told BI that Kyiv is not only driving Moscow's naval assets away, but it is also destroying them in the process — highlighting some of the strategic benefits of the campaign.

"We managed to unblock the grain corridor and suppress the activity of Russian missile launchers firing from the sea at the territory of Ukraine," said Brig. Gen. Ivan Lukashevych. "Forcing the enemy to flee from the Black Sea was the goal we sought," he added, "and it was achieved."

• A reporter found documents that appear to show details of Ted Cruz's donor meetings.
• They show how rich donors can get serious face time with influential lawmakers.
• It's not just Cruz — lots of politicians in both parties do this.

On Tuesday, reporter Pablo Manríquez discovered a collection of documents that appear to belong to Sen. Ted Cruz's campaign.

The documents, discovered in a food kiosk on the first floor of the US Capitol, appear to include information about a series of meetings between the Texas Republican and campaign donors.

The details of those meetings — including the requests Cruz is expected to make of donors, the amount of time each donor gets with the senator, and a curious reference to "outside efforts" — offer a rare window into how money in politics really works in America.

That's true not just for Cruz — a 2016 presidential candidate who faces a competitive reelection fight against Democratic Rep. Colin Allred this fall — but for many American politicians in both parties who rely on big donors.

Spokespeople for Cruz did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The details of the documents

The documents included information about several mid-week meetings, the first of which was a dinner with eight lobbyists and PAC officials at the Capital Grille in Washington, DC.

Each individual at the dinner had pledged between $1,000 and $2,500 to Cruz's campaign, according to the documents. The Texas senator's briefing materials included professional biographies of each person, along with a bold-face description of which special interest they represented.

On Wednesday, Cruz appeared to have six meetings with major donors in New York City — like many Americans, senators got the day off for Juneteenth.

For each of those New York meetings, Cruz was supplied with detailed biographies of his interlocutors, a list of their recent political contributions, and directions on how much money to ask for.

One GOP operative who's managed several outside groups in Senate races, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said there was "nothing out of the ordinary" with the documents.

"It's obviously embarrassing to have it out there, because your donors trust you to be responsible with their information," the operative quipped.

Donors get a lot of access in exchange for money

We all probably know it, but it's striking to see on paper: Money can buy you access.

For the price of as low as $1,000, you and seven other people can have dinner with Cruz on a weekday night, just a stone's throw from the Capitol.

Cruz is the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, which deals with transportation and telecommunications issues, among other things. Sure enough, several of the attendees are from groups that have financial interests in those fields, including the telecommunications firm Ericsson and the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors.

There's no guarantee that the Texas senator will do your bidding just because you gave him a couple of thousand dollars, but he may be more sympathetic to your viewpoint if you're given the time to offer it over drinks and some steak.

Meanwhile, Cruz's Wednesday in New York was stacked — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. — with more intimate, one-on-one meetings with megadonors, offering a look at just how much time fundraising can take.

Those meetings, held in wealthy donors' homes or other glamorous Manhattan restaurants, each lasted between 45 minutes and two hours.

On paper, donations are capped at $6,600. In reality, you can go way higher than that.

Under federal campaign finance law, there are fairly tight limits on how much money individuals are allowed to contribute to political campaigns.

The idea is to limit the degree of influence that one person can have over a candidate: The more a politician owes a single person for campaign contributions, the more indebted they are.

This year, it's $6,600 — $3,300 for the primary and $3,300 for the general election.

But in practice, that number can go way higher, as the documents show. For some meetings, Cruz is directed to ask a single donor whether they will contribute $119,200 to his race.

As Saurav Ghosh, the director of federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center, noted on X, that's because it's really a donation to several different groups working to reelect Cruz, including his own campaign, his "leadership PAC," the Texas GOP, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Also, if your spouse donates too, you can double that sum.

Candidates can't legally coordinate with super PACS — but they can get kind of close

Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising portion of the documents is a line included in briefing materials for several of the New York megadonor meetings: "Ask [donor] to talk to your team about outside efforts."

In this case, the phrase "outside efforts" likely refers to super PACs, which can accept unlimited donations but are legally barred from coordinating with or donating directly to politicians' campaigns.

Cruz is already in some hot water for a financial arrangement between his podcast and his super PAC. But the GOP operative who's worked on outside groups before says the arrangement is likely squarely within the bounds of the law.

"Candidates are prohibited from soliciting contributions. Candidates are not prohibited from teeing up conversations," the operative said. "The critical thing is: No explicit ask, and no explicit dollar amounts being discussed."

Ghosh, the campaign finance expert, made a similar point.

"Ask [donor] to talk to your team about outside efforts" isn't a 'solicitation' under federal campaign finance law," Ghosh wrote on X.

• Re-wearing outfits is popular at red-carpet events and in everyday life.
• Christian Siriano wants people to embrace repeating outfits they love.
• He recommends accessorizing and styling looks differently and disregarding fashion "rules."

It's official: Re-wearing outfits is in.

While "outfit repeater" was once an insult hurled at Hilary Duff's character on Disney Channel's "Lizzie McGuire," re-wearing items of clothing has even become a red-carpet trend with celebrities including Emma Stone, Cate Blanchett, and even Kate Middleton recycling their looks from years past.

Just ask Christian Siriano, who's dressed numerous celebrities for red-carpet occasions. The 38-year-old designer and past "Project Runway" winner is gearing up to host a Wardrobe Refresh Hotline event on TikTok Live as part of his partnership with Persil laundry detergent. Beginning June 26 at 6 p.m., Siriano will take live questions on Persil's TikTok account about re-styling outfits and maintaining the quality of beloved pieces.

"I love the idea that if you have something that you love or loved before, why are you not recycling your wardrobe?" Siriano told Business Insider. "Even actresses are saying now, 'It's OK to re-wear things, even on the red carpet,' so if you're just in your day-to-day life, why not?"

Siriano attributes the popularity of repeating outfits to efforts to curb overconsumption, hearkening back to a time when people had smaller wardrobes comprised of quality items that would last.

"I make clothes that are special and unique. So yeah, you're not going to wear this every day," he said as he gestured to a sparkly pink tulle piece behind him, "but I don't want you to not wear it ever again. I want you to be able to wear your special Christian Siriano gown to other things throughout your life."

Rewearing looks can also be a status symbol if the item is no longer available, Siriano said.

"I think it's kind of cool if you're with your friends and you're all hanging out and everyone's like, 'Oh my God, I love that jacket,' and you're like, 'Oh yeah, I bought it at a vintage store 10 years ago and I love it,' and people are jealous because they can't get it," he said.

Here are some of Siriano's top tips for repeating outfits with style.

Use accessories to change up an old outfit

Accessories can help breathe new life into an outfit that has been worn again and again.

"The idea here is, how do you make it new and fresh and feel different?" Siriano said. "I think that it's all about your confidence and how you can put a look together. So it's your bag, it's your shoes, it's accessories, hair and makeup."

Style the look — don't just wear it

Re-wearing a piece of clothing doesn't have to mean wearing it exactly the same way as last time.

"If you bought a beautiful blazer that you used to wear to work every single day, maybe you should wear it when you go out to dinner, and belt it and make it a dress," he said.

Forget the fashion 'rules'

Wearing an outfit again doesn't have to be a complicated decision. If you like it, wear it, regardless of what you perceive the rules or etiquette to be.

"It shouldn't be so scary like, 'Oh my god, can I wear this dress? I wore it last week,' Siriano said. "Yes, of course you can."

• "Bridgerton" star Luke Newton said the cast shares tips on surviving the spotlight each season.
• "We've now agreed that everything that goes from sibling to sibling is top secret," Newton said.
• Newton said he'll pass on his knowledge to whichever costar becomes the main character in season four.

The cast of "Bridgerton" is so tight-knit that they share confidential tips on how to survive the spotlight each season.

"We always talked about there being a book passed down through Bridgerton siblings," Luke Newton, who stars as Colin Bridgerton, said during an appearance on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" on Wednesday. "And it never actually happened. It was all just through voice notes."

Netflix's TV show adaptation of Julia Quinn's book series focuses on the intertwined lives of eight Bridergton siblings. Like the novels, each season centers on a different sibling's love story.

Season one followed Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) and Simon Basset (Regé-Jean Page) and season two focused on Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) and Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley). Season three, which recently concluded, showed Colin and Penelope Featherington's (Nicola Coughlan) friends-to-lovers romance.

During an appearance on the "Tonight Show" in May, Bailey spoke about each season's leads experiencing a new level of popularity, and the importance of staying grounded throughout the experience.

When it came to passing the torch to Newton for season three, Bailey said that his costar "didn't really need any advice, but I've been there on WhatsApp."

"And I will be for the siblings because we are bonded by this extraordinary thing," Bailey said.

Newton confirmed to Fallon that Bailey made himself available to share words of wisdom despite being busy juggling multiple TV and film projects. Season four is already in the works, but the leading Bridgerton sibling has yet to be officially announced.

"We've now agreed that everything that goes from sibling to sibling is top secret," Newton said. "It's like a Bridgerton secret. So now I will pass on to whoever the next sibling is going to be the secret code of how to survive it."

• Many Costco employees have stayed on and built long careers at the retailer.
• A manager who has been with the company over 20 years shared his best tip for getting promoted.
• "Move to some of the areas where they're growing," he told Business Insider.

Costco is a relatively uncommon employer in the retail industry in that many of its workers have started in entry-level positions and built decadeslong careers with the company.

Most notably, CEO Ron Vachris' first job was as a forklift driver 40 years ago.

So how do you get ahead?

Business Insider spoke with a manager who joined the company more than 20 years ago slinging hot dogs in the warehouse food court to make money for college.

He has since worked in multiple states and held a variety of positions, and he shared his best tip for advancing a warehouse career. BI has verified his identity but is not naming him as he is not authorized to speak to the media.

"If you seriously want to get promoted and want to grow in the company, move to some of the areas where they're growing into," he said, highlighting Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas in particular. "They have a really difficult time getting people to move there."

The company has just eight locations across those three states — less than half of what it has in New York alone. In addition to a new location slated to open in Louisiana in August, new warehouses are currently in the works for Texas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Washington, and California.

The manager said he knew one colleague who joined the company four years ago and took the opportunity to move to Oklahoma after just a year on the job.

"She's already an assistant warehouse manager," he said.

He added that her rise was likely based not just on her qualifications for the job, but also her willingness to go "where nobody wants to live."

"She ended up getting promoted a lot quicker than most anyone I've ever heard of," he said.

Historically, Costco has added around two dozen new US locations per year, and more recently execs have discussed locating new openings closer together in order to alleviate the pressure on popular warehouses dealing with long lines and crowded parking lots.

As a company, Costco has shown a distinct preference for internal hires — most of the C-suite is made up of longtime insiders — and existing warehouses are typically tapped for talent to make sure new locations have enough experience in the building to operate successfully.

"It's very, very rare that they hire a supervisor or a manager in a warehouse off the street," the manager told BI.

Veteran award-winning actor Donald Sutherland, who played the villainous President Snow in "The Hunger Games" franchise, has died.

He was 88.

In a statement on X, Kiefer Sutherland, Donald's son, confirmed his father's death.

"I personally think one of the most important actors in the history of film," Kiefer Sutherland wrote. "Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and one can never ask for more than that. A life well lived.

Sutherland was known for his decades-long career in Hollywood, where he starred in films like "MASH," "Animal House," and "Don't Look Now."

This is a developing story. Please check back later for updates.

• The US military has been moving forward on developing AI pilots in recent groundbreaking tests.
• The AI is making "dramatic" progress as it learns from flight and mission data, an Air Force officer said.
• AI is an affordable, mass solution to problems facing the Air Force and future battlefields, Shield AI's CEO said.

Last month, two US Air Force fighter jets battled in the skies above California in an intense dogfight. Air-to-air combat training isn't unusual, but what made this event strange is that one of the planes didn't have a human pilot at the stick.

The fighter, flown by an artificial intelligence agent with the Air Force secretary riding in the back, squared off in a dogfight with a manned F-16, demonstrating the rapid progress of the Air Force and Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's AI fighter pilot program.

An Air Force commander and the CEO behind the company that developed the AI, Shield AI, told Business Insider the moment was a monumental step in the program's development.

The Air Force spoke highly of it as well. Col. James Valpiani, Commandant of the Air Force Test Pilot School, told BI "Secretary [Frank] Kendall's flight marks an important milestone" for the program and speaks to growing "confidence in the state of combat autonomy."

Kendall hopped in the X-62A Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft (VISTA), the Air Force's highly modified F-16, at Edwards Air Force Base on May 2 and flew for about an hour, "witnessing several AI agents as they autonomously maneuvered the X-62 against a manned F-16 in dogfighting engagements," Valpiani said.

Throughout the testing of this emerging technology, the Air Force has been impressed by how quickly the AI can learn new information and change based on hoards of data and flight experiences.

"This interactive process allows the team to rapidly mature AI agents, often generating dramatic performance improvements from one test flight to the next," Valpiani.

Across the Pentagon, defense officials and leadership are pursuing affordable, mass AI capabilities at a breakneck pace. It's been described as a major element of great power competition with China, an arms race of sorts to keep the US at the apex ahead of future conflict.

Kendall himself called his flight in May "a transformational moment," marking the transition from when autonomous air-to-air combat had only been "a distant dream" to becoming reality.

Shield AI CEO and co-founder Ryan Tseng told BI the US should undergo a Manhattan Project approach to getting the resources, personnel, and technology for mass-implementing AI, and the autonomous pilots are just the first step.

"What we see [from Kendall's flight] is excellent progress in the performance, the trustworthiness, and the safety of AI pilots," Tseng said. "There's a tremendous amount of activity and investment on our end toward the application of AI pilots to missions that are relevant to the security challenges that are facing us around the world."

He added that AI pilots answer DoD's call for intelligent, affordable mass AI, solving concerns about the number of pilots and training needed to get them flying, as well as remaining effective in a challenging modern battlespace where GPS and communications are potentially degraded or denied.

Tseng co-founded Shield AI "to bring the best of AI and autonomy technology to the DOD and our allies to protect service members and civilians," per the company's website.

Its work with the Air Force and DARPA on the AI flying the X-62A involves trial and error, massive amounts of data, simulated dogfights — which, of the ones operated by Shield AI, see AI win-rates of 99% — and real-world applications.

But throughout all of this, the AI pilot, named Hivemind, has been maturing quicker than expected. "I think things are going much faster than people probably appreciate," Tseng said.

Lt. Col. Ryan Hefron, the Air Combat Evolution program manager for DARPA, held a similar sentiment back in April, when the Air Force announced that AI had completed a landmark real-world dogfight against a manned aircraft in September 2023. That event was the first time such a test had occurred.

Although officials were mum on whether AI or the human pilot had won the dogfight, they were eager to share a progress report.

"Things are progressing as well or faster than we had hoped," Hefron said at the time.

Much of that may be attributable to how quickly AI agents can be adjusted based on new data or performance.

Training AI for flight begins with basic maneuvers and foundations, like a human pilot; then, new missions, skills, and capabilities enter its repertoire. Many changes to the program can be made within a few hours or overnight if the AI shows "unexpected behavior," Valpiani said.

"These changes often concern the 'sim to real gap,' a common challenge in machine learning research where AI agents perform differently in real-world application than they do in a simulator due to inevitable discrepancies between the simulator and real-world environments," he explained.

Such errors can prompt the team to replicate the dogfighting scenario in a simulator, identify what went wrong, update the scenario, and retrain the AI agent. The interactive process means that the AI system is always learning and relearning.

But there are major questions about what the role of AI will be in the US military. Recent events — such as accusations that the Israel Defense Forces used AI programs to target Hamas operatives in Gaza, indiscriminately bringing civilians into harm's way — have only increased anxieties about a future war fought by AI.

DoD has made explicitly clear that AI won't make life or death decisions and that those will be left to a human being. But there are concerns about how that distinction may change as AI continues to develop at a rapid pace.

• A Tesla employee posted a video of a ride-hailing platform on LinkedIn, following previous teasers.
• The video shows the employee requesting the car on the app, adjusting its settings, and getting in.
• Elon Musk has said that Tesla will officially reveal its Robotaxi at an event on August 8.

We're less than two months away from Tesla's Robotaxi unveiling, but we're already getting an early glimpse at the ride-hailing platform on which the autonomous vehicles are expected to operate.

Rosalie Nathans, whose LinkedIn profile says she's a senior manager for used cars and online sales at Tesla, shared a video of the ride-sharing experience that's "Coming soon" in a Saturday post.

Still pinching myself that I got to demo Tesla's ride-hailing platform!" she wrote.

The video shows Nathans requesting the service by pressing a black-and-white circle with the word "Summon" within an app. Within a few seconds, the app shows a map of a car three minutes from her pickup location along with the vehicle's seating capacity and temperature. The video shows Nathans adjusting her preferred temperature before the car arrives.

Once she's inside, the video shows a central screen display with a map of the route at the top and what seems to be her arrival time, the number of minutes until her arrival, and the number of miles to the destination below. The display also seems to allow passengers options to personalize their experience by listing the current car temperature, audio volume, and song playing on the display.

At first glance, it looks a lot like Uber or Lyft — although there's not a human driver visible in the video.

Nathans did not respond to a request for comment.

Nathans's video gives us our best look yet at Elon Musk's vision for an autonomous Robotaxi service that may one day offer Tesla owners the ability to earn money on the side by adding their vehicles to the fleet. The Tesla CEO has said in the past that they could earn around $30,000 a year from doing so.

The EV giant previously teased what the ride-hailing service could look like in a longer video posted on X in late May about Tesla's goals for the future. That video was posted with a caption asking shareholders to vote on proposals at the annual shareholder meeting, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk's $55 billion pay package and moving the company's headquarters to Texas. Both were approved at the meeting last week.

Tesla's Full Self-Driving software, which is still in beta, is the underlying software technology that the company is working on to power a stand-alone Tesla Robotaxi service.

The software, which costs Tesla owners $15,000 or a monthly fee of $99 to $199, currently requires drivers' constant supervision and has drawn regulator scrutiny and lawsuits. It can currently switch lanes, recognize stop signs and traffic lights, self-park, and enter a highway without a driver's direct input.

The Robotaxi has become a main priority for the EV giant. Reuters reported the carmaker had pivoted away from a cheaper $25,000 to focus on Robotaxis — which Musk denied. The Tesla CEO has hyped up the potential for FSD as a key pillar of Tesla's valuation for years, and said in 2021 that "the day FSD goes to wide release will be one of the biggest asset value increases in history."

Tesla hasn't revealed too many other details about what the Robotaxi will look like. Musk has previously voiced the desire to have it forgo mirrors, pedals, and steering wheels, according to his biographer Walter Isaacson.

Musk has said there will be a Tesla RoboTaxi unveiling on August 8.