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

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.

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.

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.

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.