It sounds like this would be giving ~5% of the factory space to Optimus production, which seems reasonable.
It’s inevitable, the only question is how many years until it happens: 2, 5, 10, 50?
Place your bets!
There is only a "small" issue - to make those robotaxis, i.e. the self-driving system for them. Almost 20 years in, Google/Waymo is way ahead of everybody and is still not there yet (i believe we will get there anyday now - which maybe next year or in 10 years - especially giving all the avalanche of investment in AI. Though i'd have expected that 4+ years in we'd see a lot of autonomous platforms/weapons in Ukraine, yet it hasn't happen too yet)
Not sure it's going to work out. Without some big jumps in battery tech, EVs are going to be difficult to sell without subsidies.
The word "just" is doing a lot of work there. Going by that logic: We "just" need to figure out cold fusion to have effectively infinite energy. We "just" need to develop warp drives to travel across the galaxy. We "just" need to figure out the chemo problem to cure cancer.
For many people, the very term EV itself is still ubiquitous to Tesla.
And somehow Tesla is still worth more than every other non-Chinese automaker combined. $1.5T.
GM? $80B. Stellantis? $40B. Toyota? $280B. Mercedes-Benz? $60B. BMW? $55B. Volkswagen Group? Also $55B.
I’m sure I’ve missed plenty of others, but I could miss some 18 $50B automakers, and Tesla would still be worth more than all of them combined.
If Tesla was valued fairly, it would probably be at the tune of $5B. But I’ll never bet against it, because the markets can remain irrational for longer than I can remain solvent. And for some unbeknownst to me reason, the markets value Tesla as a hot tech company, not a 3rd rate automaker, which is what it actually is.
And to add insult to injury, even GM Super Cruise is widely renowned as better and safer than Tesla’s current “FSD”.
My Huyndai's Autopilot equivalent (I don't even know what they call it) is better than the enhanced Autopilot in the Model 3 that I traded in. It actually changes lanes when I put on the blinker, instead of only changing lanes 70% of the time, and the other time just sitting with the blinker on and a clear lane.
You've explained yourself why it would be untenable for Musk to pursue becoming the biggest car manufacturer in the world - if he succeeded in that goal... he would have succeded in shrinking the value of the company significantly.
It's pure logic that Tesla has to pursue bets that would justify billion dollar valuations and being a car company isn't that.
Do you have any sources for that claim? I can attest that current iteration of FSD is very, very good, and very likely is a safer driver than I am. At least one major insurance company agrees [0]. I don't have any experience with Super Cruise though.
I think it's a wrong mental model to think of stock market value as "fair" or "unfair" (or maybe it's just me thinking of "unfair" when I see the word "fair").
My impression is that if Tesla would be valued based on quantifiable things it would be much much lower (production costs, competition, revenues, potential, etc.). Of course, you shouldn't value something only based on quantifiable things, but in Tesla the "wishful thinking" part seems to be much larger than for others.
I doubt that because Tesla was not a first mover, established automotive companies were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_R%27nessa#Nissan_Altra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Ranger_EV
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_EV_Plus
Etc.
The innovation/imitation/commoditization cycle is not really new or limited to Tesla, it applies to everything from robot vacuum cleaners to CPUs. Whether Tesla survives or not probably depends a lot more on boring things like economic and trade policies of large countries.
The much more interesting thing to study would be how ice auto manufacturers not only completely wasted their first mover advantages, but also their long established brand value, supply chains and distribution and sales networks when it came to EVs.
It was not many years ago, industry "experts" were still going on about how Tesla could never hope to build cars at scale, that their "build quality" would sink them, etc. Whereas many people have rightly identified this commoditization and threats from Chinese manufacturers as being one of the biggest risks to Tesla from the beginning. Surely it's more interesting to study the things that were not obvious or well predicted?
Sure, it might be considered safer because it only allows itself to work when its on a controlled highway in a straight line.
2. The market determines what is a fair value, not rando haters on the internet. Even professional Wall Street consensus is that it's fair value at approximately $1.2T market cap.
It's a study in many things.
Tesla only exists because of the transfer of wealth from the government. DOE loans, EV tax credits and other incentives are the difference between existing and not existing.
That's not necessarily bad. The problem is the government really gets nothing for their money. Look at how China incubates their businesses.
As an example, imagine where we'd be if the government had insisted on standardized charging infrastructure instead of Tesla's originally proprietary Supercharger network.
> If Tesla was valued fairly, it would probably be at the tune of $5B.
I could see it as high as $100B but not $1.5T. Not even close.
And I, too, would never bet against it. Nothing fundamental is behind Tesla's valuation. It's just gambling.
Did they ever have a first mover advantage? They had first mover hype, but did they really have an advantage?
Companies like Kia and Hyundai had an advantage. They already had logistics, design, R&D, manufacturing, supply chains, etc. all figured out from decades of building and improving cars. Tesla had NONE of that. All Kia and Hyundai had to do to get into EVs was add another few models to their lineup with some iteration on all their existing processes. And immediately, these models became hot sellers.
Tesla had to literally reinvent (but to themselves invent) what it takes to design, build, and sell a car.
This writing has been on the wall for years. Tesla has less than a handful of models and can't even iterate on them in any substantial way. Other car makers make dozens of models and rev them every year and do a design refresh every five to ten years. Tesla never had any advantage or key selling point outside of hype.
Cult. It's a cult.
There's a contingent of tech bros that think they're "smart" because they latched on to Tesla and have been riding its nuts through Elon's political stunts without a care in the world. Tesla failing would mean to them that they failed. They can't fail, they're too smart. If they just HODL for a little longer, then he'll get something magical out and validate their decision making. Sunk cost running wild.
Cults do not operate on logic, but almost always result in a mass casualty event of some sort.
Edit: I love making legitimate points and instantly accruing downvotes from 'Valley VC types. Look yourself in the mirror.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/cnbc-china-connection-newsle...
[2] https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/limx-humanoid...
[3] https://www.bgr.com/2083491/china-agibot-humanoid-robot-us-c...
As if China cannot produce kick ass robots ? What special sauce does Musk have here that a country with a massive pool of highly trained and educated engineers and decades of manufacturing expertise don't have?
Tesla's value proposition was that it was going to be an iPod in a world of identikit MP3 players, and charge a premium for it. One brand to rule them all, no pesky dealerships, with futuristic EV tech and a touchscreen dash that made gas-powered, tactile button-laden cars obsolete.
That was twenty years ago. Tesla went from leading the pack to struggling to achieve scale, with its limelight-seeking leader increasingly holding it back. The leader wants headlines for pioneering "cool shit" and pushing hype to pump the stock price. Buyers on the other hand want affordable and timely repairs (impossible with their resistance to third party body shops and unit cost of replacement parts). As a mature company, it is completely un-equipped to compete with the incumbents whose leaders, not by coincidence, are all largely unknown to the public.
I’m confused as to what’s not clear from the article for you?
But that's okay! They have the Cybercab that will 100% drive itself For Real This Time, $99/mo Autopilot/FSD subscriptions and robots that will theoretically wash your dishes in an age where most people have an adversarial relationship with anything AI, so.
It was supposed to cost $39k at the low end and have 500 miles of range at the high end. This drove the hype and high reservation numbers.
In reality it costs $79k and offers up to 325 miles of range. Doubling the price is going to significantly limit the reach of the product.
Perhaps more interesting is the F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck in 2025 and Ford still canceled it as a failure.
I don’t think they have. Humanoid robots are a bad joke. But that’s why they are pivoting.
Meantime, as others have pointed out, the Model S and X are not selling enough to justify keeping the factory running. I don't see them going into Optimus production immediately, since as you suggest it's a solution looking for a problem.
Yearly sales of model X have been comparable to the 5 series, at least until last year when musk's political activities took the shine off the brand.
High end cars are more profitable. There are millions of 3 and Y owners with positive experiences who would stay with the brand if it had something to move up to.
My 23 MX is the best car I've ever owned. I wouldn't buy the current iterations of 3 and Y.
Most refresh X owners think it's pretty great (not perfect). There are no alternatives at the moment, mostly because other manufacturers are terrible at software development...and that's not good for software defined vehicles.
It's sad to see Tesla walk away from the luxury segment so they can focus on robots, go karts, and robots pretending to drive go karts.
Agree with other posters who say whatever you think of Musk, Tesla styling has gotten very stale.
As much as I dislike it, I can't disagree with the business case here. They already have >300k monthly subscribers at about $100/month. That business will grow rapidly from here as well as the robotaxi business itself.
Within 2 years, this business will look radically different just because of these two changes.
Didn't the US government put ~$80b into rescuing GM etc, years ago?
Subsidies bootstrapped the EV industry. Stupid policies mean walking away from the investment, ceding the market to foreign competitors, and doubling down on legacy ICE crap the rest of the world no longer wants...and Americans will be less and less able to afford.
nobody really can predict the future, so unsurprisingly, "reading various articles about this doesn't make it more clear." but people on the Internet keep getting worked up about it. to me, people do not comprehend the meaning of "high risk, high reward."
similar?! what exactly is your definition of similar? tesla and waymo are so far apart that it is difficult to accept any argument that tries to make this comparison. they cannot co-exist in the same sentence unless to explain one’s success against the other’s failures
So, it's pretty easy to see why people are confused and upset. Tesla is discontinuing all the things people like about Tesla, and selling vapourware that no one really wants anyways, instead. It's also not "a difficult conversation."
What seems more likely is that Musk, in his extreme shift to the right, has abandoned the original goal of Tesla: producing sustainable electric vehicles. He's become more and more delusional, with failing like the Boring machine and the Cybertruck starting to pile up. He's alienated his existing customer base by both getting into politics and dropping any pretext of trying to help the environment.
From my point of view, Tesla is a failed company with a leader who has gone off the rails, and a board that refuses to reign him in. Revenues are falling off a cliff outside of US governmental money, and it's betting the whole ship on only two ideas: self driving, which is so far no where close to being where it needs to be, despite the progress, and on yet another fairy tale that is humanoid robots.
Amazon has a lucrative incentive to automate its supply chain up to and including last mile delivery. Waymo has proven out the tech and could easily partner with Uber or Lyft for the rider experience and reach.
If you’re FedEx, for example, would you rather buy from Amazon or from Tesla? Who is more likely to be a sane and trustworthy partner?
At this point, it's entirely because Musk refuses to add LIDAR. If he did they could probably be competing with Waymo in a year.
S and Y are not special enough to do anything for the brand, they dont qualify as halo products anymore. Probably still wouldnt be that interesting even if refreshed.
CT is still interesting, it looks different and has some tech inside that seems worthwhile to iterate on.
And unlike traditional brands, tesla has FSD, Optimus, and Musk to do enough to keep the brand itself healthy.
My guess would be they are deciding what they can learn by iterating the CT, and might decide to drop it in a year or two when the roadster takes the halo role.
They will keep trying to improve on volume for 3 and Y.
Elon for years has said Tesla is not a car company. He’s also said the “factory is the product.” Tesla also has energy divisions and investments, as well as xAI investments now.
Logically given that Model S and X are something like less than 5% of deliveries (and have been for years), if they’re right about Optimus, that capacity will generate far greater revenue.
How many Cyber Trucks were they supposed to sell?
Yeah. And that was a car. A thing that is at least a category people buy.
> I mean, they’re very expensive, made in low volume. To be totally frank, we’re continuing to make them more for sentimental reasons than anything else. They’re really of minor importance to the future.
Now the Roadster, I could see make sense as a trophy car that rubs off coolness and sportiness to the rest of the lineup
He doesn't have FSD, camera only navigation without sensor fusion with LIDAR will fail, the only thing keeping Tesla where it is is the bullshit dispersal field that surrounds Musk.
So if I hear what you're saying, the stock will be up another 50% this year!
Yeah, that would be the Model 2, which Musk cancelled, then denied he cancelled, then has made no effort to review whatsoever so it exists in a limbo state of zero people working on it but it not being officially cancelled. Either way, it didn't come out in 2025 as planned.
https://www.cbtnews.com/tesla-execs-raise-red-flags-after-mu...
For a normal company, this would be disastrous. For a meme stock, this makes total sense since anyone claiming the Model 2 is dead can be shouted at by fans saying Musk himself disputed it was dead.
A few years ago, perhaps. But the brand has become tainted to the point where the exact people who would buy such a car are now avoiding Teslas. Instead, European manufacturers are filling that niche with cars like the Renault 5.
Tesla could stop spending money on bullshit like the Cybertruck and spend it on vehicles that people actually need/want.
When Tesla got started, full EVs were extremely niche. They were known for their short range and nothing else. Tesla defeated common sense. This is what supports their anti-common-sense stock price.
But yeah, I guess Tesla lives by its CEO (and his grand promises that keep the stock price up) and dies by its CEO (who alienated Tesla buyers by, amongst other things, throwing his lot in with a regressive fossil fuel supporting administration and by personally supervising the dismantling of agencies such as USAID).
The Chinese EVs selling in Europe are mostly bigger cars.
And the only reason they don't sell more is because we tariff the hell out of them.
I suspect China is going to beat him to the punch on this one too.
And of course, Cybertruck design might not have been mass compatible buy being ugly. But that is subjective, if it was cheap and functional and without the political connotations it might have been different.
But it was certainty a risky bet.
Niche buyers are fine, Ferrari makes a lot of money doing just that, and cars made for the masses are not always successful
Also, I am not a big fan of small EVs, and I live in Europe and I like small cars. Problem with small EVs is the range. Batteries are big, heavy, and expensive. It is fine in bigger, higher-end cars like what Tesla makes, but on a smaller, budget-friendly car, you have to make compromises, and consumers may demand a price too low to make good profit. So it is not guaranteed to be a market worth taking, especially if you have to compete on price against the Chinese.
Lol... not with those tariffs. In fact, I'd be willing to bet we see higher growth of Tata than Telsa in Europe over the next 10 years.
Re: Robots bla bla: yeah, of course. FSD bla bla. Meh.
If you sell millions and its your main product, your company is over. This is the same playbook German manufacturers followed since forever. I bet the next gen Model 3 and robotaxi will get the cybertruck tech.
Has it? I really don't know but I see these every day in my major city and there was a closed mall parking lot filled with cybertrucks the local dealer used to park there which were quickly turned over.
With all of that, the stock closed upwards on the after market hours. Perhaps only Musk's death could cause it to tank, would have never expected to see a cult of personality being run on the top of S&P 500 market caps, what a strange world...
> Tesla’s far more popular models are the 3 and Y, which accounted for 97% of the company’s 1.59 million deliveries last year
I feel like EVs are a checkbox product - you either make things 'good enough' for the customer - range, driving dynamics, power, charge speed, smart features, autonomous stuff or don't.
To get range right you need a big battery and low drag and efficiency - the only way you can make the first 2 things in the same vehicle is to create an aerodynamic shape.
This is a packaging problem, you need to make the car low, and long - so you stretch it out, so the battery can be thinner and no longer pushes up the rest of the vehicle. You also have a lot of place in the front for crash structures, and aero shaping. Finally since your car is big (D segment), you can charge more money as per conventions of the market.
If you make a C or B segment car, you either reduce the battery size to save money, which makes it impractical for general use or pack in all that stuff into a smaller volume, and you get a car thats more expensive to make than a Model 3, while having worse drag and range, while the market expects you to charge less for it.
These small cars only make sense with a small battery, but you wouldn't want one for yourself as a second car - hence the robotaxi.
So no, your hypothetical Model 2 would not be cheaper if you didn't compromise it in some major way, which they dont wanna do.
Upwards differentiation is also hard for Tesla - base models are already powerful enough, have all the smart features, they wont compromise on autonomous stuff etc.
This is not only my opinion but the market's - S and X sold like 2 orders of magnitude less cars than the 3 and Y.
I'm not so sure on this one. I think we'll see it this year. It will have embarrassing bugs (ie. running over cats which are hiding under the car) and we'll see lots of issues to begin with (ie. the car stops in the middle of a freeway because a camera got splattered with mud).
But I think they'll achieve the goal of something that can be deployed fairly widespread without public outrage causing it to be banned without lidar.
I'm not 100% what you mean by "dispersal field", but outside of America, Elon's image in recent years has done more harm to Tesla than good.
With the 3 and the Y they're already catering for a large part of the market demand, but a smaller model, and a stationwagon might help get it up to 80%+ of all demand.
The markets the have been missing to this point are the big passenger / cargo carriers like a minivan or full size SUV.
If you can train a policy that drives well on cameras, you can get self-driving. If you can't, you're fucked, and no amount of extra sensors will save you.
Self-driving isn't a sensor problem. It always was, is, and always will be an AI problem.
No amount of LIDAR engineering will ever get you a LIDAR that outputs ground truth steering commands. The best you'll ever get is noisy depth estimate speckles that you'll have to massage with, guess what, AI, to get them to do anything of use.
Sensor suite choice is an aside. Camera only 360 coverage? Good enough to move on. The rest of the problem lies with AI.
Meanwhile, RIP Windows, Google Search, and maybe the entire games industry, maybe even then end of affordable home computing and being forced to rent computing power from 'the cloud'.
For some reason my Youtube echo chamber is trying to convince me that BYD makes so many cars but cannot sell them. It's really bizarre. Other things it's trying to convince me of "Don't get an electric car. Period", "Ukraine won. Done deal", "Trump is devastated" about something else every day. Yes I do want the latter two to be true and it's playing on that but I don't get the BYD thing.
The problem is that Musk has been promising it for almost 10 years and it is still not sufficiently stable to be rolled out and relied upon by car owners.
FSD is only actually "ready" in terms of the whole "don't need to own a car for personal transport" when there can be passengers and no driver.
When Mom can dispatch the family car to pick up the kids from school.
So it's literally nothing special compared to other manufacturers. I am happy to argue that's it's a better Level 2 than most others, sure. But it's still just that. No magic, no bullshitty "by 2017 the car will drive itself from New York to Los Angeles". No it hasn't and no it won't.
If.
It doesn't exist in isolation. The competition isn't just from the American firms, but also European and Chinese, and it isn't really possible to overlook Musk himself given both his long history of Musk over-promising and under-delivering, deflecting blame.
Even the current release isn't what Musk was talking hopefully about a decade ago, e.g.:
Our goal is, and I feel pretty good about this goal, that we'll be able to do a demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York, from home in LA to let's say dropping you off in Times Square in New York, and then having the car go park itself, by the end of next year. Without the need for a single touch, including the charger.
Likewise, based on a video I saw recently from someone reproducing Tesla's 2016 "Paint It Black" drive, Tesla's AI is only now around the performance level that they faked in 2016.
Don't get me wrong, that level was impressive… just, the world isn't isolated developments.
"Tesla’s far more popular models are the 3 and Y, which accounted for 97% of the company’s 1.59 million deliveries last year."
Humans are fallible and we have other sensors, like hearing, or touch (through feedback on the steering wheel) that are also involved in driving.
We already have other sensors that are not vision that work with us when driving like ABS and electronic stability.
The other reason it's dumb is that adding LIDAR and proper sensor fusion makes things better and the cost of LIDAR is rapidly dropping as its installed across new fleets in CN and elsewhere.
I never understood why they would choose to fight with "one hand behind your back". More sensors = more better
I don’t think it makes sense to limit yourself while you are still figuring out what really works. You should go with a maximum of sensors and once it works, you can see what can be left out.
Eyesight isn’t the thing. Humans have a persistent mental model of the world, and of the physics that drive it. Our eyes only check in every now and then to keep our model up to date.
Our ears and sense of touch do a lot of work in walking and driving, too. Trying to narrow it all down to vision is silly.
There's nothing inherently wrong with a company deciding to stop producing models that are extremely old, have newer comparable models that are more widely available globally and sell multiples more of. So why would you keep those older models?
If anything its a good thing. But its Tesla so nothing they do will be spoken positively of.
Because Tesla is being measured against the benchmarks they set for themselves. It's not a good look with cancelled models, declining sales, and a lot of self-inflicted brand damage.
Musk used to claim Tesla will sell 20 million vehicles per year:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
The new goal is to have sold 20 million in total by 2035. That target represents a further decline in sales. And, given that Tesla over-hypes everything, maybe they won't achieve it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/business/elon-musk-tesla-...
They went from being able to profitably produce a luxury car, to not being able to profitably produce a luxury car, to not being able to produce a luxury car at all. All while becoming uncompetitive in the econobox market, and losing huge chunks of it even before their real competitors arrive in market…
On top of all the problems you have identified, as well as more, they’re clearly now just aiming for fantasy land.
They completely refreshed the Model Y last year and made a number of updates to the Model 3 including different body word.
Since he couldn't leave it at that, he announced a pivot to a product that doesn't exist. This is also negative.
Ford got rid of plenty of popular models including all hatchbacks and many sedans.
Also we can have a conversation without tossing the "everyone hates Tesla!" poison down the well immediately.
The Model S is comparable performance to the Model 3 performance.
My point is that the latest models 3 & Y are more affordable alternatives to the S & X and more widely available globally.
The other way of looking at this: The X is the only Tesla model with door handles that aren't stupid.
10 years ago people here would be describing this as a good decision.
GameStop is buying and selling used games, which is becoming impossible as consoles keep pushing for digital games.
GameStop requires a major shift in their business model to stay relevant, while Tesla just needs to hope the public doesn’t reject the idea of electrics cars out of stubbornness or politics.
While there is a lot of hype baked into both stocks, it seems like hype with Tesla is founded in more reality than the GameStop hype.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/tesla-earnings-profit-q4-2...
They’ve been overvalued for a very very long time. And then the head of the company decided to alienate as many people as possible. All while pouring a ton of resources into a product that very few people want instead of saner things.
Humanoid robots? Ain’t nobody made the business case for that. It is pure vibes.
I thought it was hyperloop. I thought it was suboribital taxis. I thought it was underground taxis. I thought it was self-driving semi trucks. Or was it solar roofs? Or powerwall? Wait weren't we supposed to be on the moon again right now?
He's a bullshitter. Yea, he picks good targets, but he is entirely full of shit. The market just does not reflect this. He should have been golden parachuted onto a yacht years ago.
The dam is breaking. We have Canada lowering tariffs and agreeing to allow the import of Chinese EVs (limited, at least to start with) and the US administration goes off on Canada for doing it because they know what it means: crumbling American influence.
South America, Africa and Asia are likely forever lost to Tesla. And European sales are tumbling.
The supercharger network will maintain some inertia for some time but only for so long.
You can see this in Tesla announcements about attempts to diversify. AI robots? I'll believe it when I see it. Robotaxis? Well you're reliant on FSD for that and you have stiff competition in Waymo and who knows what China is cooking up there.
The GP was correct: it's a meme stock. It's no longer an investment in a business. It's an investment in Elon and, more generally, an investment in the administration. There's no fundamental way to predict how that goes and on what time scale. If you want to gamble, gamble. But gamgling is what it is. And, just like Twitter, I guarantee you the people at the top won't be left holding the bag.
What robots are they making?
Where can you buy one? What does it do?
I am not sure. I think buyers or potential buyers shifted their assessment of Tesla in the last, say, 1-2 years a lot.
You can’t just compare Tesla to a meme stock when the founder’s side gig is launching and landing orbital rockets - a feat that even the most technologically advanced nation states have failed to accomplish.
Come on people, use a little critical thinking skills.
But I will concede the founder's other side gigs would appear to have significantly affected its sales
1. SpaceX was an exceptionally well-executed good idea, and continues to be a leader in innovation.
2. Tesla brought EVs to the mass consumer market and proved the profitability of EVs.
3. Elon Musk was essential to the success of SpaceX and Tesla.
4. Tesla now has fierce competition in the category it defined: EVs.
5. Tesla has undergone revenue and profit reduction.
6. While it experiences promise in alternate product lines, Tesla is not a market leader in robotics (Unitree, Boston Dynamics) or self-driving cars (Baidu, Waymo). Tesla reported profit growth in residential solar and residential power storage, but the revenues from these verticals are dwarfed by other segments.
7. The trend over the past decades is Elon Musk being successful at innovating in underserved parts of the market.
8. Elon Musk is not currently pursuing any underserved parts of the market.
I can't tell if this is real and he realizes the traditional luxury brands have beaten him or if he's just using the classic rug store sales tactic.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/rozelle-rug...
In many countries, "carpet salesman" is equivalent to "used car salesman" as the least trustworthy occupation imaginable.
- Average Selling Price;
- Cars produced vs cars sold;
- How many unsold cars are in inventory. I did find this [1];
- A model breakdown of the above 2.
The reason I'm interested in this because my theory is that:
1. Sales have been shifting from the Model S/X to the Model 3/Y, which reduces average selling price and overall profit. Stopping production is really about the inventory glut;
2. Unsold inventory is going up, particularly for the Cybertruck; and
3. Tesla marketshare is collapsing in many markets due to a combination of brand collapse among the most likely EV buyers and competition from lower-priced alternatives, particularly Chinese EVs in developing markets.
So what exactly is propping up this company at an above $1T market cap?
[1]: https://electrek.co/2025/06/17/tesla-tsla-inventory-overflow...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1F5IQOynIawoXiJPV...
So Tesla deserves credit for building the first electric cars that people actually wanted to buy. They also deserve credit for building the largest and most reliable charging network - a key factor in making electric car ownership more feasible.
But they’ve made a lot of poor decisions recently and all the money and power went to Elon’s head. I think it was beneficial to the world for Tesla to exist and do that important work early on, and now it’s beneficial to the world for the company to die.
Of those, the Leaf is the only model that has continuously existed since then, and from the documentary there is a sense of that. GM admits the Volt was a stepping stone and not the final product. Tesla's part of the documentary involves a lot of trials and tribulations and even Tesla seeming unsure about their manufacturing problems. (Though the documentary itself spins a hopeful tune.)
Of the figures in the documentary the most prescient seems to be Carlos Ghosn, then in charge of Renault-Nissan. He very much insisted that EVs weren't just the future, they were the scramble for the present. Renault took that message to heart and seemed to be the side that won it in the messy divorce that also eventually wound up with Ghosn getting charged for treason and embezzlement in Japan. Which is an incredible and weird story on multiple levels and maybe the documentary makers will get a chance to include that in a third movie for the series.
Convincing investors to buy and hold Tesla, because of the vague promise of some great technological innovation being just around the corner. Electric cars and partially automated driving don't serve that purpose anymore.
A longer horizon promise of multi-trillion dollar wealth generation for Tesla.
As the whole robotaxi thing is starting to fizzle, Elon has quite notably talked more and more about how actually Optimus is the true gem of Tesla.
I have no doubt there will be many tens of millions of them, it’s just a question of when. 5 years? 10? 50?
Their electronics, batteries, motors, etc., are world class. Packaging this up into something a partner can use to build actual cars could have less risk. An electric motor or battery can propel many kinds of automobile. They tend to keep their value better when stored in this format too. The moment everything is integrated into a car, things get very bad very quickly unless you're selling Ferraris or Lamborghinis.
This was maybe true 5-10 years ago, but not today.
https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/predictions...
Saying that, I wouldn’t be too surprised if robotaxi replaces 90% of taxis and Ubers in the next 5-7 years.
But yea, stepping from sinking raft to the next…
As such, my guess is “not any time soon”.
“we’re hoping to debut [next gen roadster] in April, hopefully. It’s gonna be something out of this world.”
(I’m just the messenger, don’t shoot me)
I thought the same thing about the (usable, upgradable) mac pro, but then they came out with the trash can mac pro 2013.
If Tesla completely exits automotive and decides to license their FSD tech (or someone else catches up), then I'll probably just get whatever the equivalent of a Bolt is then with that and premium sound.
And they just might, too. Recall that the EV tax credit went away this year along with regulatory credits to other auto OEMs, which was a huge part of their business. This combined with the Cybertruck (unsurprisingly!) missing sales targets is problematic.
Don't get me wrong, I don't generally lust after EVs, but I am looking forward to the R3X....
However, the 3 is lighter, has better headlight clusters, the light accent inside of the cabin (that I thought the S was getting, but I guess not), and a marginally better sound system.
Couldn't have said it better
Linus Pauling. Chemistry 1954, peace 1962.
TIL that Model S hasn't been as popular. But hopefully when the 2nd gen Roadster finally gets released that it will fill in the slight gap left by Model S's discontinuation.
While "The old auto establishment" is not a benevolent structure, they proved that experience is something earned with time and doing things. Corporate knowledge and memory is real, and you can't beat it with brute force.
They started the change, but they failed to keep up with the pace. Also hubris, greed and monies.
Toyota sells more cars in a year then Tesla has sold ever.
When Tesla came about, they were distinctively different. A different chassis, a different weight distribution, completely different dynamics. Since they started with a blank slate, their cars were greenfield projects, and they correctly took note of the pitfalls, and avoided them.
On the other hand, avoiding past pitfalls or remedying them doesn't make you immune from the future ones, and doesn't mean the other companies can't learn, too. This is where they made the mistake.
They overpromised (esp. with the Autopilot thingy) and underdelivered massively on that front, and while they "made" the software-defined-vehicle, they underestimated the problems and behaved like the problems they face are as simple as configuring a web service right. This is what slowly broke them. They also underestimated hardware problems of the car (like using consumer grade parts in the critical parts of the hardware. Remember wearing down flash chips and bricking cars?)
Because while car is software defined now, it's also an "industrial system". It has to be robust. It has to be reliable, idiot-proof even. Playing fast and loose with these things allowed automakers to catch them, maybe slowly but surely.
Because, "the old automakers" has gone through a lot of blood, sweat and tears (both figuratively and literally), and know what to do and what not to do. They can anticipate pitfalls better then a "newbie" carmaker. They shuddered, sputtered, hesitated, but they are in the move now. They will evolve this more slowly, but in a more reliable and safer way. They won't play that fast, but the products will be more refined. They won't skimp on radars because someone doesn't believe in them, for example.
Not everything is numbers, valuations and great expansions which look good on quarterlies, news, politics, and populists. Sometimes the slow and steads wins, and it goes for longer.
Physics and engineering doesn't care for valuations. They only care about natural laws.
This is what I'm seeing here.
Don't be surprised if something else takes its place as they do need something larger than Y and less expensive than X was.
“Full Automated Parenting”. You win a Darwin award on behalf of your kids if you fall for this shtick.
I did not look forward to the news articles about robots accidentally dropping or squashing babies.
I’m very bullish on humanoid robots, but this seems absolutely batshit insane to me. These things are no where near ready for full scale production.
why not kill the cybertruck instead?
Tesla crashed the allure of its brand by lowering the price point of the Y and 3. The X and S aren’t different enough to attract $100K+ purchasers.
(It’s one reason why Toyota and other brands use different marks like Lexus for their high end offerings).
What they are really signaling though is with EVs they are not able to differentiate between the higher and lower cost models enough to show value to the higher end models. This is a huge failure IMO. Model S was the OG car that really was looked up to when it launched. It did have them luxury image, by not matching the build and interior of the car to the image Tesla really dropped the ball. Now the S is seen as inferior to the other luxury cars in that price range and so it’s becoming tough for Tesla to differentiate between the 3 and S.
This actually brings up the larger question, does musk care about cars at all at this point? Or does he just want to move on to robots? Feels like his heart is not on the cars.
X going away probably isn't surprising given sales dynamics. More people would tend to opt for the cross-over or sedan. The model S is a little more shocking since it was always niche, but honestly Tesla doesn't have the trim to be priced like that and I suspect in order to get from where they're at to BMW/Audi etc., just isn't where they want to invest their money.
This definitely feels like an "oh no, people stopped buying" pivot but the moves themselves make sense.
This is like asking Mrs. Lincoln what she thought about the play. The scope of the (financial and physical) damage by Musk's government meddling is breathtaking, is ongoing, and will echo for generations.
Add why should anyone look past their opinions about the leader?
We have the saying “the fish rots from the head” for a good reason. Tesla has been rotten ever since Elon got involved.
Not a fanboy, but this seems like it went exactly according to plan.
Adjusted for inflation, $30k then is around $45k now. Tesla sells a Model 3 for just over $35k.
It doesn't make any sense to hold someone to a promise like that and not adjust it for inflation. I think you can legitimately complain that he didn't meet the timeline he was aiming for.
The possibility of FSD is probably the only reason I paid $10K more for a M3 over a BYD Seal. But free FSD? Who can compete with that. Nobody.
Also, turning FSD into a subscription is total enshittification and I hate it. It would also go a long way to coax back peeved off buyers and convince them not to make their 2nd EV a different brand.
My current sentiment towards Tesla for making FSD subscription-only AFTER I bought my car? Screw you. Go to hell. It’s MY $80k asset. I feel betrayed.
The level of cynicism of the discussion is overwhelming, frankly. I get it that some people don't like Musk because of his politics, but why should that prevent people interested in technology to at least try to present a steelman case?
Let me try it, at a risk to be down-voted to oblivion...
1. As people correctly point out, S&X are outdated, low volume models. Investing more engineering time in them doesn't make any business sense; these engineering resources and capital should be clearly redeployed elsewhere.
2. People think that Waymo is supposedly better(?) than FSD, but at least some very well informed people (and NVIDIA as a company) believe that it's not. Personal anecdote: an older (HW3) version of Tesla drove me perfectly well in Yosemite last weekend, in on winding mountain roads with 0 cell phone coverage. It will take Waymo forever to map everything there properly with LIDAR, and true autonomy only in selected metro areas has limited value.
3. It's obvious that when we have autonomous, general purpose humanoid robots, they will completely transform our societies. Any such robots would require an enormous AI/vision investment. Say what you want about Elon, but xAI basically caught up with the top LLM shops in ~18 months, and now have comparable AI training capacity. You can bet against Optimus, but who else would have the skills to bring both the technology and the AI to market first? China? Good robotics, but no enough data to train their vision models comparing to Tesla, at least not yet.
4. So the bear case is that (a) driving autonomy is not possible without LIDAR, (b) Tesla can't bring another very complex product to market, and (c) autonomous robots are not possible in our lifetime. If you look at the AI progress even in the last 12 months, that's a tough sell to me.
What are the serious, tech-based counterarguments to the points above?
I'll try to provide some counter-points specifically regarding the rate of progress.
3. It's much easier to catch up in capability (ex. LLMs) than it is to achieve a new capability (ex. replace humans laborers with humanoid robots). You can hire someone from a competitor, secrets eventually leak out, the search space is narrowed etc.
4(c). To me, what's most important is whether or not truly autonomous humanoid robots happens in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, etc. rather than in our lifetime.
These timelines will be tied to AI development timelines which largely outside the control of any one player like Tesla. I believe the world is bottlenecked on compute and that the current compute is not sufficient for physical AI.
It's extremely easy to be too early (ex. many of the self driving car companies of the past decade), and so for Tesla, there is a risk of over-investing in manufacturing robots before the core technology is ready.
Re: both 3 and 4(c) - agree that compute (or maybe even power for that compute) is likely to be a bottleneck in the next 3-5 years. However, I think Tesla/xAI are better positioned than many competitors as Tesla is a manufacturing company first and foremost; and this expertise (which is shared freely between Musk's companies) can help it to build it's own data centers, power generation (e.g., solar), or - in the most bullish case - even fab capacity.
2. Waymo has been offering a driverless taxi service for some time now, and Tesla is not. That's a hard fact. Meanwhile your arguments are beliefs and personal anecdotes.
When, or rather if, Tesla starts offering their service, they will be behind Waymo by approximately however long ago Waymo started theirs, so at least a few years.
Unless you have some "serious, tech-based counterarguments"?
3. It's also obvious that when we have AGI, fusion, etc., they will completely transform our societies. I promise I will deliver you those by the end of this year. Send money now. If my timeline slips by a little—maybe a few decades—well, it was just a best-effort estimate and I did deliver in the end!
4. No, the bear case is that there's no real reason to believe Tesla would be the company that captures the market vs any other company. Their solar, tunnelling, and now car business models have failed/are failing, so they must win on self-driving/robots.
Self-driving is looking really bad, they're badly losing to Waymo.
They have shown nothing in terms of robots. If anything, dressing people up as robots and showing that is a rather negative signal. Oh, and robots are at least a 10x harder problem than self-driving.
Some of these same commenters were trying to make you believe not long ago that FSD wasn't going to be competitive with Waymo because it dropped LIDAR. If you bring that up now they'll just change goalposts. There's no point even arguing with someone unable to approach an argument in good faith.
Source: 45000 miles in a bit over two years, loved every minute of it. Makes our other high priced German car a disappointing machine to be avoided if possible.
for us lot who were 'born in it, molded by it' (tech), it can be very hard to internalize that there are a lot of people out there who legimiately cannot for the life of them wrap their head around a computer, or the internet, other than "wifi logo = i can video call my grandkids".
you could say services like dropbox are outreach/charity organisations that onboard the masses onto 10x productivity curves (whether they like it or not!)
and to be honest, ive become guilty of drag n dropping tarballs to/from my gdrive account when im too dumb to figure out the ssh proxy tunnel incantation (or beg an llm for one for the 1000th time.) so really, everyone wins.
im not sure claude code will change all that much for the non-technical segment. from their point of view, you changed one terminal window for another. so what? its still a black box (literally).
Are they betting Robotaxi will replace all cars in the future?
So you double down on what you have that no one else can compete on.
Q4 sales: Model 3 & Model Y: 406,585 deliveries All Other Models (S/X/Cybertruck): 11,642 deliveries
X launched in 2016.
Both launched with slow rollouts.
Meanwhile, the average car in use today is 13 years old and getting older. (I currently drive a 22 year old car)
It definitely turns me off buying a used model S to know it's being discontinued. And if I extrapolate that to the 3/Y, a new purchase.
Given my desire for a midsize family sedan, it makes it feel like BMW i4 or Porsche Taycan just won me over in the future.
Most people in the western world have no clue HOW bad the crisis in our electronics industry caused by AI BS, tariff wars etc is.
When you wanted to get anything done in China as a western company, last year you might have issues to have China allow EXPORT. For example due to the pissing contest about Nexperia, a lot of really basic chips like USB controllers suddenly were forbidden for export.
And since January 1st 2026, things got far worse: Now some standard connectors (that are, amongst others, used in cars) that are made in the USA can no longer be IMPORTED into China. Which means that you now can typically will have parts missing on PCBAs that you then have to re-solder with the missing US components somewhere else. And many don't have the competence for this anymore.
This is all just wild speculation.
And I am pretty sure that right now it will be next to impossible to source parts for such a complex product like a robot. I need grey market brokers locally in Shenzhen to get even the most basic stuff at insane prices. And a lot of stuff simply is no longer available at all, due to things like "Intel has replaced anyone with a brain with an AI, and now no longer is able to produce and chip embedded N150 CPUs from the US to China, because... how?".
Tesla is now putting in 4680 battery cells back into the Model Y. Years after they had discontinued the 4680 program. What does that mean? They are using up whatever parts they still have, like everybody else in the electronics industry is now doing.
Good luck buying a computer, phone, fridge, car or toaster in the second half of 2026.
1. Build sports car
2. Use that money to build an affordable car
3. Use that money to build an even more affordable car
4. While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options
he got distracted by side-missions, his personal shitty side
however if you separate the ideas from the person you can see how such a simple strategy was executed successfully
5. Peace out from Tesla for a while to pivot hard into far-right politics, using outsized power and influence to wage culture wars, alienate core customers, and inject volatility into a brand that was built on trust, optimism, and engineering credibility.
6. Unveil Optimus as the next grand pillar of the vision, not as a shipping product but as a perpetual demo, a future-shaped distraction that soaks up attention while core execution, margins, and credibility quietly erode.
Tesla step 6 Optimus robot is not. Others are ahead, with less hype and more delivery. See Boston Dynamics / Hyundai
His idea is to keep involving more investors, more people, government is possible in tesla's orbit with nice stories. When other are so invested the failures aren't his problem anymore, he got hist compensation which is tied to the company price.
Setup automated low gravity refueling depots. Then automated mining of the solar system will scale up as it more than pays for itself. And as with Starlink, SpaceX synergy would give him a serious advantage.
Much faster to achieve (despite the challenges), less expensive, and more profitable than a human Mars colony which would burn money without return for decades.
(Regardless of wishful thinking, civilizations coming backup is a second substrate adapted to the rest of the solar system, not a colony suffering truly miserable conditions. Although I am all for human exploration, which would also be easier and cheaper on the back of expanding automated infrastructure.)