This is historical artefact: HK with its short distances is very suitable to EVs, and the government initially supported EVs with tax breaks. In other words, people bought a lot of Teslas when it was the only game in town.
For new registrations, BYD overtook Tesla back in 2025 with a yoy growth of 67.8% vs Tesla -3.8%, and in the latest available month (June) had more than 4x as many registrations as Tesla.
It's not exactly market-dominating growth justifying a 300+ P/E ratio.
https://www.thestandard.com.hk/news/article/319010/EVs-make-...
https://kr-asia.com/pulses/155906
https://hkcarrank.com/jan-2026-private-car-registration-data...
https://www.td.gov.hk/en/transport_in_hong_kong/transport_fi... -> check table 4.1(e)
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.
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)
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.
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.
The main problem isn't even the tech, though the tech isn't as good as it seems either.
Their main advance hasn't been the BCI: other teams also do this, main limiting factor is product lifetime rather than electrode count (though yes their count is higher).
The surgical robot is a much more interesting thing than the BCI. But even with the robot, "interesting" rather than "amazing" because (1) what else can that robot do? (2) what does it cost to use? (3) was it reliable enough for humans, or the reason for all the animal welfare issues? (4) some other BCI teams working on delivery via blood vessel and less invasive is better.
Main thing though for any sucessful medical tech is cost. Even with FDA (or non-US equivalents, somehow I don't even know the name of my local equivalent), medical interventions are famously expensive enough in the US to bankrupt and insurance in the US is famously reluctant to pay the full costs.
And up a level, the problem with Neuralink is their output suggests a lack of care to detail, of emphasis on speed over quality, and of having inherited Musk's personal attitude problem when faced with criticism.
Hyperloop was a tech not a company and if I listed every tech he's done wrong I'd be rightly accused of misunderstanding how R&D investments are necessarily gambles.
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 :)
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.
Terafab profitability is really tough to get right, I'm open to ideas -- there's operating profit, operating profit net of amortization / depreciation, there's like six phases of the terafab specced out running through 203X (and as you say, slippage is inevitable there). I'd want to be considered a winner if the value of the EUV machines is up significantly, e.g. it was a balance sheet winner.
Send proposals.
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.
If Optimus is in use at factories in 2029 then it will absolutely be able to produce more than a thousand robots a month by the end of 2031, just using any sort of geometric production curve as a swag.
As to users, I think if it can provide home services, they're going to sell a ton of them.
As to Elon's forecasts, yes, double them at least. And, also, he's mostly right historically, if delayed substantially. I think there's near infinite demand for $1/hr robot labor in the US.
And yet… when it’s Elon Musk’s company, we are suddenly all numbers and figures, and we waggle our fingers disapprovingly that he doesn’t have board approval. Yes, with Musk you have a childish huckster asshole. And increasingly it does appear he’s gone off the deep end, buying into his own self mythology. But the one redeeming quality he still demonstrates is refusal to settle for doing the same thing over and over. He continually and unreasonably pushes the envelope.
Tesla has definitively become a successful company. They defied all the naysayers in reaching that success, and it has turned into a global behemoth. They have oodles of money. The fact that Musk tirelessly insists on trying new moonshots that seem ridiculous is a GOOD thing - it’s the thing we _lack_. Inventive, audacious risk-taking is exactly what our stupid extractive scam economy lacks. Compared to you and me, yes, Musk is a cringey edgelord with the energy of a weird kid at the sleepover who tells bragging lies. But compared to his cohort who run large businesses, he is a goal oriented doer who attracts great talent and then relentlessly pushes them to achieve the impossible. And they actually succeed some non-zero amount of the time. It doesn’t matter that not every idea is a winner. That’s not how moonshots work. The point is that _some_ moonshot ideas do work though and actually move us up the tech tree. And the probable reality is that the delusional unrealistic asshole _helps_ push you there, precisely because they cannot be reasoned with. No, you cannot build moonshot companies without grandiosity, because the people working on it need to have a mission that is bigger than dollars and cents or common sense. If the only thing pushing you is good financials, you will quit as soon as “projections” start to look bad. In the area of moonshots, projections are just the opinions of uninformed non-believers who will ALWAYS mount until the world convinces you to stop working on the “stupid” thing.
All that said, the flying car is the dumbest thing I’ve seen him push and I don’t find it remotely exciting. Self-driving and robots are way cooler.
However, the root of this conversation is not about Musk at all but about whether Tesla's core business (automotive) is in trouble. The answer to that, as Musk is demonstrably convinced as well as I am, is "yes."
Then we get into Musk's own personal idiosyncrasies and to what degree they're a liability or an asset to pull Tesla away from doom. For the reasons you mention, they're an asset. Not many leaders are willing to throw the wheel like he is (Zuck being another example). For other reasons, his idiosyncrasies are a liability. Like the fact that he personally was single-handedly responsible for destroying huge amounts of Tesla's brand power and that his personal project (the Cybertruck) inflicted such gargantuan direct and indirect cost on Tesla at such a critical moment.
Again, the question is whether Tesla's core business is in trouble. The answer is yes. Nobody remarks that it's such an incredible thing that a CEO of an unambiguously crushing-it company is willing to yolo the company into new directions.
Point being: phrases like 'rationalization' and 'wishful thinking' exist for a reason. You should be extremely skeptical of how fairly you are assessing the prospects of a company run by people you hate. You are almost definitely interpreting the outlook uncharitably.
Late stage capitalism was coined over a century ago. It still hasn't happened.
What does happen, however, is a company will grow until it strangles itself with committees and bureaucracy. And then gets replaced with a younger company. A good book on this is "The Innovator's Dilemma".
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.
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).
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.
You've also cherry-picked an instance where Tesla reported weaker than expected growth but you've omitted the times where it reported stronger than expected growth.
As for shrinking margins, that's largely due to growing R&D spending. That's not necessarily or even normally a negative thing.
The growing investment into AI and autonomy is part of a very long standing trend that has been declared for about decade. It's not an indication of desperation (beyond the ever-present desperation that companies always feel with the heat of competitive fires under their feet) or some failure of some previous plan.
I want to add one final point, and that is that every company's position is precarious, including Tesla's. So if that is what you're saying about Tesla, I would agree.
Where I would disagree is in the insinuation that its position is any more tenuous or precarious than any other company's.
Markets can change. Consumer tastes can change. Research and development efforts can fail. competitors can emerge. All these things hold true for every company all the time. And it holds true for Tesla. So, being a cynic when it comes to the prospects of a specific company is very likely to prove prescient. The only point I would disagree with you on is the idea that Tesla's position has recently degraded. Its position has always been precarious, and it has succeeded despite that, not because of some comparatively superior past position.
Yes, a site the corroborates:
>October 2: Tesla deliveries fall 2% as US consumers buy fewer EVs
Tesla outperformed expectations and the overall US EV market by a landslide. [US EV] sales in Q3 2026 were down 39.5% from a year ago whereas Tesla was only down 2%.
>July 23: Tesla shares tumble 11% as discounts hit profits
The stock is up 19% since then.
>April 2: Tesla reports weaker than expected 6% rise in global deliveries
Subsequently crushed the next quarters, breaking previous records as stated above.
>Tesla growth is slowing
The EV market is slowing, yet Tesla outperforms.
>margins are getting crunched
This is true for every automaker.
>competition is heating up
LOL! Competition is getting crushed, some of it leaving the EV market entirely.
>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.
Peak Elon Derangement Syndrome. Take the L, you're out of your league and your own sources proved you wrong.
> [US EV] sales in Q3 2026 were down 39.5% from a year ago whereas Tesla was only down 2%.
Tesla's global sales were down 2%. Their US sales were down 20%. Tesla's decline itself constitutes 1/5th of the overall US decline.
While Tesla's US EV sales fell 20%, Rivian's grew 45%, and Toyota climbed 328%.
You're aware that "they're in a cooling sector" is not a good rebuttal to "their core business is endangered," right?
> Peak Elon Derangement Syndrome. Take the L, you're out of your league and your own sources proved you wrong.
You're so right, king. Elon is pivoting out of cars because they're just crushing it tooooo hard in the car business. Excellent response. The [X] Derangement Syndrome formulation is just shorthand for "I've decided to shut my brain off."
My god, he's replyguying over taking the L.
>Tesla's global sales were down 2%. Their US sales were down 20%. Tesla's decline itself constitutes 1/5th of the overall US decline.
The slump in EV sales has Tesla's increasing it's share of the US EV market. Market share increased even though its US sales were down for the eighth straight month in September. US sales were down 16 percent compared to the same period last year, and just blew out the quarter.
Tesla gained market share while just delivering a record quarter.
>While Tesla's US EV sales fell 20%, Rivian's grew 45%, and Toyota climbed 328%.
GMC’s U.S. EV sales fell about 57%, Ford fell 80%, Volkswagen is down 90% nearly out of the market, Kia/Hyundai (one of the best non-Tesla EV sales) down 50%.
Of course Rivian grew, they're ramping their factory, but the stock just hit a 52-week low, did not give great guidance for Q4.
>You're aware that "they're in a cooling sector" is not a good rebuttal to "their core business is endangered," right?
You're aware that a "cooling sector" that ebbs and flows != "core business is endangered," right? No, you're not aware, you're oblivious.
>You're so right, king.
At least you admit your EDS.
>Elon is pivoting out of cars because they're just crushing it tooooo hard in the car business.
Pivoting out so hard they had a record quarter for deliveries and gained market share LOLOL, delusional.
>The [X] Derangement Syndrome formulation is just shorthand for "I've decided to shut my brain off."
Yes, you have shut your brain off, thank you for admitting it.
We haven't even touched on Tesla Power, up 10%.
You’re literally bragging about a company losing less slowly than (some) of its competitors?
And yes actually being in a cooling sector does mean your business is endangered lmao. That’s literally why Elon is pivoting!
What’s your explanation for the pivot?