[Traster]

The problem is that to get where they are they've needed huge investment and issued huge amounts of debt. They are only able to do that because of the huge valuation justified by self-driving technology. If they end up as a company churning out great electric vehicles that is not going to justify being valued at 50% more than Ford.

What costs Tesla money is building great big battery factories and car factories, meanwhile the the software engineers working on self-driving are a relative drop in the bucket but justify probably 80% of the market cap.

[mikeash]

Their market cap was already over $30 billion in August 2014, before the first version of Autopilot was announced.