So first, why is robotaxi not happening? Well, it is just not on the scale they need it to. In addition to Waymo, many other companies are working on driverless systems and they're all making good progress. nVidia has a full stack competitors based on VLA models, as do Chinese manufacturers etc. In short, we'll see capable self driving systems from probably a dozen companies world wide. Tesla has some advantage here, but real world acceptance and scaling are slow, trust in Tesla is low and most of their cars are physically incapable of running the size of models L4 systems will require. My 2022 Model Y has roughly the same processing power as my Rovers Jetson Orin Nano and that thing isn't driving itself.
The humanoid part is even worse, Tesla has absolutely no structural advantages there - they're no better than Chinese companies at making the hardware and they're no better than the AI Labs at developing the models required. Also, again low trust. Tons of people will absolutely not let a tesla bot in their house. There's no reason to think they'll be wildly successful, and the actual capabilities and economic usefulness of humanoids are still some years away.
The ETFs are designed such that at any point in time, they are roughly 2x short the stock, but they do this by buying derivatives over time which means that the stock decreasing by X or increasing by Y doesn't mean you'll gain or lose 2X or 2Y over a long time period. If the stock increases first, then decreases, you'll probably lose money even if it ends up lower than when you bought it.
I think just shorting the stock or buying long dated put options is probably a better way to do it.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092815/risks...
This is not financial advice.
I saw some videos that seemingly showed them to just be remote controlled by a human, but I don’t research deeply enough on it to be confident that it was true.
I also expect their robotaxis and robots to be a joke business-wise for the foreseeable future, but I totally disagree that they have much to do with the stock price. The real driver is Elon's immense cult following. The Tesla stock price has always been absurd relative the actual business, but cult followers don't care about financial statements, or engineering work, or business logic. They will ignore all of that to support their leader.
Elon has been spewing blatant lies for well over a decade at this point and always claims to be chasing some shiny object a year out that will transform the business and grow its revenue to match the valuation. It never happens, but people don't care.
He has lost some supporters from his peak due to his political and social media insanity, but most of the diehards have kept by him. The odds of him diving back into MAGA politics in a visible way is a larger stock price risk than continuously declining sales, but even then he would have to go to extreme lengths to shake off most of the people who have stuck behind him for this long.
https://cardog.app/blog/byd-canada-full-lineup
The only reason Tesla is still in business is American protectionism.
Looks like classic manipulation so they can buy low before we hit $10T valuation
