The big problem for Tesla is that they cannot sustain their valuation from the car manufacturing business. There's a perpetual need to justify why Tesla should be valued an order of magnitude more than other automakers. Selling the dream of future profit is Tesla's main business.

(For the record Tesla makes roughly 10% of Toyota's profits and has almost 3 times the valuation, no Tesla shareholder is ready for a 97% share price drop so Tesla has to keep the dream machine at full steam).

Edit: Tesla is 3 times Toyota in valuation, not 5 as I said earlier, not that it changes the argument much.

Being in the EV business means having to compete with China. This market is dictated by manufacturing costs and so it is not where you want to be.

Well fsd and robotaxi are still mere futuristic concepts and semi vaporware but I get it, that doesn't sell shares anymore

Model 3 and Y are basically the same car and both are tied for last in Europe

Crazy that they have a $1.4T market cap while having given up their entire business (which was never worth a fraction of that anyway).

Truth. However it's pretty great marketing, fairly certain every car enthusiast on the planet has seen that demonstration. Eyeballs that likely can't be bought otherwise. The flying version will never be made for a human occupant, but if they do make a few they will be collectors items.

To be fair, I did not believe for a moment that this was a serious idea. Instead it looks a stunt to be performed, not a serous consumer feature. Surely? Such a feature would never pass FMVSS muster.

> That the SEC allows any of this gives me zero confidence in the entire market.

It will be truly nasty for the next President. All of this shit is going to blow up hard, even worse than 2007 was. With any luck, it will blow up during Trump's final months, but in the truly worst case it will collapse during the early time of whoever the next President is, which means no matter who gets the job will get smoked in the 2030 midterms - in turn ending up like Obama who didn't have a majority of his own for six years (or, in the even worse case, end up like Biden who didn't survive the reelection against someone as unlikeable as Trump).

Hyundai has been making robots for decades. Imagine the hype if Tesla did half the things Hyundai is doing.

Those are just side projects. SpaceX is now an AI company. All their phony future revenue projections are dependent on magic numbers cooked up by a drug addict who convinces people to believe his stream of lies.

FYI, Tesla makes a large fraction of its profits off the margins from selling grid-scale ("Megapack") batteries to utilities; renewable energy projects (buffering energy generated by e.g. private wind farms); and most recently, data centers (where they act either as giant battery-backed UPS systems, or as reservoirs between on-site power generation and fluctuating on-site demand.)

They probably have also been trying to penetrate the military energy storage market (a.k.a. "tactical microgrids"), but so far they haven't. They need more vertical integration for that. Right now they don't own battery-cell manufacturing, so the defense contractors that build ruggedized battery packs skip them and go straight to sourcing from the battery-cell manufacturers.

(Fun fact: Tesla's Gigafactories as physical spaces produce a ton of battery cells, but Tesla itself doesn't. Tesla leases space in its Gigafactories to cell manufacturers like Panasonic, who actually produce the cells, so that Tesla can then directly consume some of the cells produced into battery packs, without any intervening logistics costs.)

It's always been my own personal stance that Tesla is a battery company, that happens to sell some of its battery packs in the form of cars. (Remember that 80% of the depreciated value of an EV is its batteries.) The cars were never the core of Tesla's business model; they were a useful vertically-integrated B2C demand-sink they used to bootstrap their B2B battery sales business.

Value the company by the sizzle not the steak. And before it fails completely fold it into the next grift. Sounds far fetched but it's been working for Elon for years.

I think it’s pretty obvious: sell the machines that replace humans as AI improves, and be ready to run that AI at massive scale.

First off is robotaxis and semis (99% of highway driving and 80-90% of city driving driver jobs have been very effectively replaced right now by machine, look at Waymo if you don’t believe Elon), and then Optimus for stuff that needs hands, like warehouse workers or other low-skill “move heavy things from here to there” jobs.

My six year old Tesla 3 just drove me from Vegas to LA, door to door, without me having to give it any control inputs. Not a lot of people seem to be paying attention to how good it is now.

I imagine Optimus will be a really big deal once they get it working as well as Teslas drive.

"Elon/Tesla seems to go after the next big thing every couple of years without a real plan."

I wouldn't consider this to be a weakness, necessarily. No plan survives a contact with the enemy, and the market is sorta-kinda war with unclear sides and developments. Plans tend to bind people to their old decisions, and make them beholden to sunk costs even if the world drifts in another direction.

Neuralink brain uploads! Preorder now for immortality!

The line of business is fine. Tesla & SpaceX both make things people want. Neither cars nor rockets are being disrupted by AI. They could achieve good-to-great growth under stable, full-time, drug-free management. But if you feel you need a large amount of capital and you want to retain control of SpaceX and Tesla, bolting these startups onto them is a way to double down. It's just a shame to see those existing things get torched.

> The last new release of a truly mainstream car was the Model 3 a decade ago.

I'm no Tesla fan, but having longevity in car models is a good thing. My fun car was built by VW in Germany for a decade and then by VW in South Africa for another decade; parts availability is great.

In today's marketplace of very samey cars, models that work should probably last a decade or more.

That said, Tesla could have built out a couple more styles, such as maybe a minivan/workvan/delivery van, although van sales can be pretty cyclical, and Tesla parts and service was (is?) notoriously poor in some cases, so I dunno if commercial users would be interested.

Not to mention that internationally they are competing with Chinese EVs which are very compelling alternatives.

$100 per month in a $40k vehicle that allows it to drive sufficiently well 99% of the time such that it reduces driver stress and liability is worth something.

Other car manufacturers somehow can’t even provide dashcam recordings in a $40 vehicle.

It’s pretty absurd to base such a high valuation on things that don’t exist. Not only do they not exist, they’ve missed every deadline put out by Musk for over a decade. This is where you put the CEO in prison in a functioning society.

Either that or the pics of him shirtless in Mykonos.

Everyone else is getting the counter-argument wrong. The counter-argument is that the robots are better than humans in some cases, but the places they are worse they're worse in a non-human way and react in non-human ways. It's precisely that that will make the risk worse. Also, when an insurance company insures a driver, the lawsuit is against the driver and they're most out what a single bad driver can do. When the lawsuit is against CyberCabs, it's against all cabs and the most they're out is a class action lawsuit against all CyberCabs + negligence etc + Tesla has deeper pockets.

So on principle, you're probably right. In practice it's easy to see why a corporation running a fleet of self-driving vehicles would have a different insurance profile than randos driving around.

No it doesn't only need to be better than the average human

Autonomous vehicles will be held to much higher standards than the average human being and therefore incredibly difficult if not impossible for them to attain. Why? Because we can relate to another human being and their infallibilty ("That could've been me") but the same cannot be said of an A.I.

One child run over and killed by a CyberCab and the government will have to nationalize SpaceX to prevent it from evaporating and taking $4 Trillion with it.

Is that because Tesla is actually more popular, or because Tesla offers fewer options than, say, BYD?

Who sells more cars in China: Tesla or BYD?

And like the author, are you suggesting that is because JB left the company?

Why would him being there have changed anything? What ‘hit product’ could JB have launched that you would have bought given everything that happened with Tesla.

They update it all the time. It’s not old, it’s new. Yes it finally is starting to achieve the promise of 10 years ago… and the market is recognizing it and they are calling out the subscription growth on the earnings calls. 67% yoy growth this year.

Most people don’t care that some guy paid $10k for a feature on a $80k car 10 years ago that didn’t achieve its crazy promise. They care that they can pay $99 today for a feature that blows away their expectations, AND is good enough to not just be a surprising novelty but something they use long term.

There are so many robotaxis in austin. Something like 300 waymos and 350 Teslas? I love waymo and wont step into a robotaxi, but people definitely are riding them.

Tesla's free cash flow is up over that time and that's the real measure of profit:

2023: $4.357 billion

2024: $3.581 billion

2025: $6.22 billion

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/tesla-mode...

https://www.focus2move.com/world-car-market/

He personally co-designed S3.

Its more about lack of morals than IQ per se, seeing them only convenient when aligned. Plenty of smart folks with dubious morals when it actually counts out there

From the outside in this is how I see it (being in Austin which seems to be ground zero for a lot of the testing):

Waymo is betting that cutting zero corners and being rigorous will pay off down the line. They seem best in class.

Zoox seems to be betting that reducing time to get passengers in and out while providing a novel platform will be a differentiator. More sensors than Tesla but fewer cars than both the others.

Cybercab seems to be about cutting cost (and corners) wherever they thing they can get away from it and betting cheap will win the day (sort of like a discount airline). This assumes they're not doing something O(N) expensive behind the scenes, like having every ride monitored by a human operator in another country.

I remember some company dragging a person for awhile and the car not realizing. I'm worried tesla will find itself in a situation like that (or another edge case). I feel safer being around a Waymo as a pedestrian than a cybercab. I even had a Waymo stop for me at a pedestrian crossing when I was waiting for it to go by (I wasn't trying to cross).

In the long run Waymo will have to figure out how to have a cheaper platform and Tesla will have to toe the cheap/good-enough line. Zoox is still seemingly unlaunched so IDK about them. Time will tell.

Tesla has had a massive surge in cybercabs in Austin over the last few weeks. I would venture to say they have surpassed the number of Waymos over here. Don't have any numbers to back this up though. As for being profitable, it seems the cost of a cybercab should be much less than a Waymo.

Did you take a look at amount of money waymo is losing let alone profit?

Unsupervised robotaxi has lower (at fault) accidents than unsupervised waymo.

All notable cybercab accidents have been done by remote driving.

The only thing waymo have are - large fleet thus large miles/week - many cities

In last week or so, Tesla went from tiny to equal/more than waymo in Austin seemingly in just a few days.

They'll do that in other cities too in due time.

It may be the other way around if the pace in Austin is repeated elsewhere. Cybercab rides per week has already surpassed, Waymo, allegedly.

https://x.com/KHerriage/status/2114902145627504719

There always gonna be both Pepsi and Cola.

If a few things work out for Tesla they can do overshadow Waymo very quickly.

Waymo’s entire fleet is estimated at about 6000 cars. Tesla produces this many cars in a little over a day.

The cybercab is also likely to end up costing 1/10th of a Waymo car

It’s not that Tesla is winning here. But the economics of their solution can totally tilt the entire market in the future.

Waymo isn't profitable at all. It's a massive money loser. And in some cities Tesla is nearly at parity

Speaking as someone who follows the NFL, people will forgive all kinds of horrendous behavior if the player's team is winning. It's easy to say things in the abstract like "won't buy a Tesla" because most people aren't really shopping for a car all that often. But if the cybertaxi works and is cheap, then I would guess a lot of people won't be sticking to their proclaimed values. That said, I have my doubts that cybercab will really work all that well.

Why do you hate so many people?

> There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk.

You guys have to realize at some point that you're not a significant part of the market. There are a lot of people who don't particularly like musk but the amount that would never use a cybercab isn't a significant part of a 300m person market.

Lack of lidar isn't the biggest problem. Nor will adding it make Tesla's cabs suddenly reliable and useful. They don't have Google's geospatial data, they don't have the remote intervention infrastructure, they haven't expanded it across multiple cities and built out the service infrastructure to clean and repair their fleet. They don't have the financial history to go to Pimco for term loans paid out of cash flow.

"Politics got involved" from the beginning. In the context of USA politics, being an EV company while your CEO talked about how important electrification was to stave off the effects of human caused climate change is 100% a politically coded act.

What happened wasn't "politics got involved", what happened was that CEO started talking other politics.

And to say that "politics got involved" is a ridiculously passive statement. Elon has full control over how he publicly acts. Politics "didn't get involved" from 2022 onwards, Elon's publicly articulated political views significantly shifted, AND THEN Elon personally led massive organizational changes in the federal government.

Regardless of if you support or oppose DOGE, it's completely dishonest to wall off his actions at DOGE into a separate category of acts that you can clearly separate from his business.

This is a business lesson that most competent CEOs are intuitively aware of.

Elon's cognitive decline from drug addiction affected both his business and political decision making. pre-ketamine Elon delivered the Falcon 9, Model 3/Y, and Starlink. post-ketamine Elon gave us Cybertruck, Starship (aka the SpaceX Cybertruck), and a bunch of fake products like the flying roadster, humanoid robots, and Cybercab.

Almost as if journalists were paid partisan hacks.

Musk has been consistently vile the entire time, it's just that liberals always think they were always right, even when they had the opposite opinion five minutes ago and were advocating that people who have their current opinion be fired and arrested for treason. He must have changed they say.

Even now, they have no idea how to criticize him because they adore the blindingly wealthy, opinionated, and willing to use that wealth to force that opinion on others (it's upper-middle-class sainthood.) His biggest crime somehow is that he allowed you to say what you wanted on twitter. His second biggest is that he went after the "administrative state", which is this mysterious theory that the Executive Branch should have authority distinct from the President, and therefore not be subject to democracy at all, in any way. Just like they turned on Assange, it's always telling that their consistent enemy is democracy. Democracy is directly offensive to the credentials that they dedicated their lives and compromised their personal integrity to get from wealthy people and institutions.

They're offended by Musk because they wanted to show their Teslas off, and to talk about the projects that their company partnered with Tesla on at parties, and to be proud of their kids getting named Tesla scholars and getting Tesla genius grants. They can't be because he's obviously a slimeball in a way that they can't overlook and ignore and mock the victims of (in return for money and status.) That's it. They, however, are currently overlooking the crimes of their favored billionaires and employers, so have no language to articulate their resentment of him that doesn't also incriminate themselves. So it's just this insane inarticulate id-explosion.

Reminds me of people being embarrassed about working at Arthur Anderson or Lehman Brothers at parties. "I worked in accounting; I worked in insurance," they would say. Their mothers used to gush about them, and now they don't even mention the names of the companies, like a father who died in prison. All Musk's properties are like that now, as well as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.. Musk's properties still actually even come out better than other tech slop because they all ostensibly have some material purpose other than extracting rents from normal people through deceit and by doing the least work possible.

I used to have a name for people who can't see this dynamic: "emoluments libs." They were the libs during Trump's first term who kept saying "The Democrats aren't going after Trump for profiting from his office because they're too afraid." No, dude. They're not going after him because they have the same deals with the same people, and everything that they would go after him for implicates them too. After you avoid the obvious, you're left with impeaching a totally corrupt guy for not arming Ukraine hard enough to threaten Russia hard enough because they wouldn't cooperate in uncovering the blatant corruption of a prominent Democrat. If that's the best you've got, a thing that sabotages one of your own prominent politicians (who was destined to win the next presidency by a hair), and highlights an evil thing you're currently doing in Ukraine, the other alternatives must be really horrible i.e. would send you to jail with him. Their only bright spot is that they hoped it would take (a notoriously disobedient) Biden out so The Atlantic libs could push one of their soulless golems Harris or Buttigieg into the presidency.

I have to be honest. I'm part of the ancient left that is celebrating the imminent death of the middle class, because it's their weird psychology that is killing us. I encourage their replacement with AI wherever it is possible, my criticism of AI is that it is still not good enough to do it, and if the middle class have anything to say about it it will never be. They will ruin it by either coddling the owners of AI to total flaccid laziness or threatening the owners of AI to make them cripple it, but they will make sure that they will maintain a lawn by any means necessary. They will, however, never give a shit about the uninsured unless they get sick themselves.