I'd bet that Tesla would do much better without him. It wouldn't look like it at first, because there would be a correction of the value of the company from "imaginary" to "realistic", but it would result in a company that is on more solid ground.
The shareholders are more or less willing hostages. If Elon leaves they lose 80% of their money. But there's another whole dimension to the problem: nobody will take the job until the stock price collapses. Any replacement for Elon will get the blame if they come in too soon.
>‘Tesla Dilemma’: Elon Musk is destroying Tesla’s profitable car business, but at the current valuation, his lies about self-driving and robots is what is keeping the stock alive.
It's crazy and nuts but it makes sense. The choice is between keeping hype alive and delaying doom or doom now.
Tesla
P/E: 254
PEG: 116
For a car company with $1.46T market cap and modest revenue growth in last 12 quarters (3 years) those numbers are ridiculous.
You can't get SpaceX stock easily. Doesn't Tesla own some SpaceX stock? Could that be part of the valuation? I agree, it makes zero sense. I don't believe in Tesla long term but I do believe in SpaceX long term.
These numbers are honestly ridiculous. I don't even know how you arrive to these valuations without seriously fudging things. It may as well say TSLA is worth a bajillion dollars. If your thing is "worth" orders of magnitude more than anyone would be willing to pay, guess what? It's really only as valuable as anyone would spend on it. Everything else is fluff.
Tesla is at most worth 1/10 of it's current valuation. Given its huge legal liabilities ahead from selling 'self-driving cars' for the past 10 years, it's probably closer to 0.
The crazy valuation is 100% dependent on Musk staying.
Musk net worth is very much dependent on Tesla too - if Tesla crashes, so does his fortune (yes, SpaceX is valued at a crazy number too, but it's not liquid and doesn't bring any real cashflow, at least not yet. And he used Tesla shares as collateral worth billions).
Tesla board member are all Musk buddies and have 0 agency.
Telsa shareholders know perfectly well that the stock tanks if he's gone.
Yeah, in short - everybody knows it doesn't make any sense anymore, including Musk and Tesla, but they have to keep the ball rolling, because they are all in it together. Every involved party looses money if he quits. If he stays they can get some more years of dumping their stock on naive 'investors' that are getting duped by the massive propaganda operation run on Twitter.
PS. Robotaxi will serve 50% of US population before the end of the year according to Tesla & Musk /s
> everybody knows it doesn't make any sense anymore,
The shareholders must not know. Because they can sell whenever they want they don't need to turn the company around. They think Elon is going to put ten billion Optimus out in a few years and the cars are all going to be robotaxis..or they think that more people will think that and send it higher.
They can't even deliver the self-driving car they keep promising; why should we believe that they have some special expertise in automation which will allow them to build better robots than anyone else?
Robotaxi is rolled out and we are not seeing crazy videos like we do with Waymo (who admittedly is doing more miles).
What is exactly with their AI that does not satisfy your criteria? xAI seems to be SOTA, IIRC unbeated in coding performance for whole half year now or so.
> xAI seems to be SOTA, IIRC unbeated in coding performance for whole half year now or so
(1) Not according to any of the listings I've seen. I mean, don't get me wrong, they're occasionally at the top, but nobody is persistently at the top for more than about 6 weeks.
The Tesla Optimus is, unlike Optimus Prime, smaller than a car. This means it has less room for battery and compute. The gap between the cars and the robots suggests that Koomey's law[0] will still require 5-10 years to go from compute that can run in and operate a self-driving car (by any constant standard[1]) and compute that can run in the power envelope available to a humanoid robot which can get into any old car and drive it equally well.
And that's just the ability to drive a car. To be what Musk is selling Optimus as, it would have to be much more capable than simply driving a car.
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None of this precludes him selling Optimus robots as remote control units, where the AI is only the bare minimum for walking without falling over. This would already be transformative to a lot of industries, and if such robots would have a TCO in factory conditions of, say, $24k/year, could easily lead to a lot of American factories being filled with such robots remotely controlled by people in other countries very happy to get paid $12k/year, and a whole bunch of very confused and also very unemployed Americans.
I suspect a lot of people will feel cheated if this is what happens… but also, I have not seen any specific minimum requirement for what is actually shipped for this payout. Musk being the troll he is, I wouldn't put it past him to buy out Hasbro, ship a million of these, and claim victory: https://www.amazon.com/Optimus-Auto-Converting-Transformers-...
