According to Plan

RJ: You're probably seeing the news.

RJ: Volkswagen. A hundred thousand jobs. Four plants. The largest restructuring in the history of the automotive industry.

RJ: And I want to be clear about something.

RJ: This is all going according to plan.

RJ: Now, the media will tell you this is a crisis. They'll say VW is in freefall. They'll say CARIAD burned seven billion euros trying to build software, and the best they produced was a delayed update to a navigation system that nobody asked for.

RJ: They'll point to the four shuttered German plants and say the empire is crumbling. And they're right. But they think this is happening to Volkswagen. It's happening for us.

RJ: Let me walk you through the plan, which I definitely had before any of this happened.

RJ: Phase one: software capture. We let VW give us five billion dollars — which, and I want to be precise here, they did. Willingly. They walked into our office in Irvine and said, please take our money, we cannot make the screen work.

RJ: And I said, we'd be happy to help. And I smiled. And they left feeling good about it.

RJ: That's phase one. That's the capture. They handed us the keys to the software layer because CARIAD couldn't ship a radio app without breaking the car. Sometimes literally.

RJ: Phase two: Scout. They let us build their heritage brand. They gave us the name, the logo, the nostalgia, and then they stepped back and said, you know what, you guys are really good at this.

RJ: Yes. We are. That's why you paid us five billion dollars in phase one, which I definitely planned.

RJ: Phase three: the flip. This is where it gets good. VW's market cap is a hundred billion euros. Rivian's is thirteen billion dollars. On paper, they're eight times bigger than us. But here's the thing about paper.

RJ: It burns.

RJ: Phase four: rationalization. I didn't even have to do phase four. They're doing it to themselves. A hundred thousand jobs. Four plants. They're cutting off their own limbs because the body is dying, and the brain — the Porsche and Piëch families — finally looked at the spreadsheet and said, why does every software update cost three hundred million euros?

RJ: I'll tell you why. Because you hired nine thousand software engineers in Munich, and none of them could agree on a font for the dashboard clock.

RJ: Meanwhile, in China — BYD, NIO, Xpeng — they're eating VW's lunch. They've eaten the lunch. They're working on the dinner.

RJ: VW's market share in China is doing this, and ours is doing this, because we make the software. That's the whole thing. We make the software that VW can't make, that CARIAD couldn't make with seven billion euros and the combined engineering power of the German automotive establishment.

RJ: We made it in Irvine, with like two hundred people and a coffee machine.

RJ: Now, the Porsche and Piëch families control Volkswagen through a complicated voting share structure that I understand perfectly, because I have a PowerPoint about it.

RJ: And right now, those families are looking at two options. Option A: continue watching a hundred-billion-euro company shed a hundred thousand jobs and four plants while Chinese competitors take over every market they've held for forty years.

RJ: Option B: call RJ.

RJ: They're going to call RJ.

RJ: And when they call — and they will call — I'm not going to acquire Volkswagen. That would be egotistical. I'm going to do something much more elegant. I'm going to let them acquire me. At a significant premium. With stock that will be worth ten times what it is today within five years.

RJ: Because phase four — the rationalization, the layoffs, the plant closures, the painful restructuring that the media is calling the death of German manufacturing — that's the cost of not having Rivian software.

RJ: A hundred thousand jobs is the price VW paid for CARIAD.

RJ: And once that invoice is paid — once the stock bottoms out, once the families are desperate, once the market is fully priced in the collapse — I step in. With our software. With our platform. With a thirteen-billion-dollar company that somehow, miraculously, is worth more than a hundred-billion-euro company, because we can make the screen work.

RJ: I don't need to acquire them. I just have to wait.

RJ: This has been phase four. And it's going according to plan.