Elon promised self driving cars in 12 months back in 2017? He’s also promising Optimus robots doing surgery on humans in 3 years? Extrapolating…………… Optimus is going to kill some humans and it will all be worth it!
There isn't enough money and most importantly margin in the car industry to warrant such a valuation, so he has to pivot away from cars into the next thing.
Just to make an example of how risky it is to be a car company for Tesla.
In 2025 Toyota has had: 3.5 times Tesla's revenue, 8 times the net income and twice the margin.
And Toyota has a market cap that is 6 times lower than Tesla.
It would take tesla a gargantuan effort to match Toyota's numbers and margins, and if it matched it...it would be a disaster for Tesla's stock.
Hell, Tesla makes much less money than Mercedes Benz and with a smaller margin..
Mercedes has 60% more revenue and twice the net income. Yet, Tesla is valued around 40 times Mercedes-Benz.
Tesla *must* pivot away from cars and make it a side business or sooner or later that stuff is crashing, and it will crash fast and hard.
Musk understands that, which is why he focusing on robo taxis and robots. It's the only way to sell Tesla to naive investors.
I see nothing wrong here, correction back to reality.
I understand why people adored him blindly in the early days, but liking him now after its clear what sort of person he is and always will be is same as liking trump. Many people still do it, but its hardly a defensible position unless on is already invested in his empire.
I found the article I was talking about: https://alisoncrosthwait.substack.com/p/a-ketamine-addicts-p...
It says it's quite easy for ketamine use to get out of control without the users noticing, that they're are able to work effectively despite that, and that they tend to develop radically different and delusional beliefs. Given that Elon has admitted to self-administering ketamine, I don't think the idea should be dismissed.
Look how much longer, and more experience Waymo has and they still have multiple issues a week popping up online, and thats with running them in a very small well mapped and planned out area. Musk wants robo taxies globally, that's just not happening, not any time soon and certainly not by the 10 year limit for him to get his trillion dollar bonus from Tesla, which is the only reason he's pushing so hard to make it happen.
But when you look at it:
- X.ai is basically getting into the race by throwing money at the problem and using your name to get funding in a hyped industry.
- Do a buyout of your own company with it, get access to data that you restricted to everyone else.
- Merge it with SpaceX for "datacenters in space", do an IPO for a huge valuation
- Probably merge it with Tesla, overhype everything
- As the humanoid, AI and space industry grows, so will the valuation just because of the market growth, not necessarily because of great/revolutionary products
At that point, nobody can even consider what the valuation is, as it is a mishmash of promises, fudged numbers, real numbers, potential numbers, contracts, hype and everything else. It allows moving financials around and tuning things to get him his 1T package and hype things even more.
I mean congrats to Elon, just by overhyping his products he shifts the timeline narrative more towards techno-optimism and earns himself more money. The financial shenanigans to follow in the next few years will be an interesting period for future financial archeologists.
Well, everyone is doing that. That's what AI research is.