I am not sure you can detach these two concepts. Tesla is currently valued around 3x the next top 5 auto companies combined, so to an extent you need to judge the company on these expectations. I happen to think they do have a pretty good business selling cars, and maybe a very good business selling autonomous cars, but there's so much uncertainty I think it is hard to see the current market cap as anything other than hugely inflated.
I'm interested to meet someone online who's short both on-shore US silicon fabs and the market for humanoid robots. Can you say more about your thinking?
Musk is similar to Zuck in that they get some credit for sheer courage to turn the wheel on their massive businesses, but they also have to be right. Aside from his anticompetitive behavior, Zuck continues to miss. Musk's pattern has been that the more Musk is personally involved, the worse the outcomes. Cybertruck was his baby. Optimus is his baby.
If Tesla is doing so well as an automotive business, then why doesn't he just continue making it a great automotive business?
Maybe a mid length answer is if you agree with his assessment on say humanoid robots in terms of market and you believe they might have a geometric growth factor in production (eg robots can make more robots) then you’d want that business build out done by a team that can scale rapidly.
For fabs spacex and Tesla are significant consumers of the output- vertical integration is preferred by lots of companies.
Correct, and I think having a CEO who's totally unaccountable to a board and is temperamentally unable to focus on his core business is not good.
SpaceX and Tesla are nowhere near large enough consumers to justify vertically integrating a fab. The demand is predicated on Optimus producing millions of units per year.
This circularity will probably end up being seen in retrospect as so transparently absurd that it'll beggar belief that anyone accepted it.
That said I think these bets will pay off. Let’s check in in five years!
Do you have particular predictions we can evaluate in five years?
2) more than 1mm optimus produced and sold in the US
Happy for any counters :)
I'd bet that in 5 years time Optimus total sales are in the 10's of thousands at best, with few to no large scale industrial users (other than self-use by Musk). Customers will be similar to what AgiBot and Unitree currently have - entertainment, hospitality, academic, small scale trials, plus a few Tesla fanboy sales that don't do anything actually productive.
1MM Optimus sold in the US is hilarious too.
Want to make bets on these?
My prediction is Musk will become less and less stable, more and more flamboyant and performative, and less and less effective.
He's already saying he suffers from occasional AI psychosis, and there is no chance that's going to get better on its own.
The only new western car company in decades to not fail, based on a technology nobody believed in at the time, least of all other car companies
SpaceX being a private space company, which was completely unheard of. No experts though they could succeed
Smaller earlier businesses like Zip2, paypal, etc
These are gigantic high risk companies with high failure probabilities, the chance they they all happened to be successful despite Musk and not at least in part because of him is stretching reasonable doubt for me.
I'm absolutely no fan of his politics or personality, but the man can run a business that nobody else even dares try (at least until he demonstrates viability and the market starts to generate competitors)
Three sucesses.
Not so successful: Solar City, Neuralink, TBC, X.
(X exists, but before it was valued-and-bought by one of Musk's other companies, it appeared to have lost about half its value).
Richard Branson he aint.
They put out this video of a patient with ALS regaining the ability to communicate.
Hard to see that not being successful, once it passes the FDA, assuming it's real.
Of course it’s still early days for all these companies and they’re not exactly fiscally solid, but if Tesla had not made all those cars, someone else would have.
Why exactly do you think he keeps repositioning them as a robotics oh wait no I mean an AI company? Why is he clearly positioning Tesla to be acquired by SpaceX? Why is Tesla investing into xAI to be converted into SpaceX shares?
Tesla’s actual business, making cars, continues to degrade. The Roadster (obviously) is not going to help.
They have a huge balance sheet so it’ll take a while but Musk obviously sees the writing on the wall. The sheen is wearing off their shitty products and he doesn’t know how to add the sheen back or make the products less shitty.
No it's not.
>Tesla’s actual business, making cars, continues to degrade.
False. Revenue and deliveries beat so far this year, Q3 also a beat.
Don't let your Elon Derangement Syndrome cloud your ability to think rationally.
TSLA is down 18% YTD. That's because their business is doing so well?
You're aware that the "expectations" are they run a profitable company, right?
>You're aware that expectations are increasingly that Tesla's business is struggling?
You're aware that the expectations are increasingly that Tesla's business is stable, and showed record deliveries and backlog in Q2?
>TSLA is down 18% YTD. That's because their business is doing so well?
Auto manufacturing sector (DJUSAU) is down 16% YTD, and Tesla's stock is overpriced to begin with. Tesla's most direct competitor in the US, Rivian, is down 34% YTD. Stop getting your business/economic news from BlueSky/reddit.
And where should they get them? From Twitter?
Credible business/economic news outlets.
>From Twitter?
No.
October 2: Tesla deliveries fall 2% as US consumers buy fewer EVs
July 23: Tesla shares tumble 11% as discounts hit profits
April 2: Tesla reports weaker than expected 6% rise in global deliveries
January 29: Tesla scraps models in pivot to AI as annual revenue falls for the first time
Tesla growth is slowing, margins are getting crunched, competition is heating up. Tesla knows they're fucked so they're pivoting into AI. The pivot into AI might work, but Musk himself unambiguously thinks Tesla is fucked as an automotive company.
That's why Musk is trying to claim Tesla isn't an automotive company (except when comparisons to such suit him and his cultists, of course).