[TheAlchemist]

Maybe past 2 years, once it become obvious that sales growth is stopping and Tesla 'pivoted' to another story.

Until about mid-2024, Tesla was still projecting a 50% growth in car sales per year, until 2030 - with a goal of selling 20M car / year by that deadline. That was a very nice story that people believed.

Now they believe that Tesla will produce billions of Optimus robots. Which is also a nice story.

[spwa4]

Especially when you realize they're actually behind their far cheaper Chinese competition ...

There's also 10 Chinese and even some European startup competitors that aren't even bothering with advanced mechanics. Humanoid robots that can be described as "quasi-direct-drive motors with sticks in between", that do everything the Tesla robots can.

If Tesla's demonstrated anything, it's that they can barely match 10 year old Boston Dynamics demonstrations, and 2-3 year old Chinese demonstrations. It's making clear what everyone in robotics knew 40 years ago: software will win robotics. Not hardware.

And let's just not mention the very embarrassing "human disguised as robot" demos Musk did.

[bdangubic]

not the past 2 years - more than a decade on "robotaxi" (https://brandonpaddock.substack.com/p/a-brief-history-of-tes...) ... the bots came later...

[TheAlchemist]

For retail investors indeed, the 'carrot' was robotaxi and lately robots.

But many (most) Wall Street analysts were attaching 0 importance to these 2, and their valuations were mostly driven by the projections of auto-sales. Which indeed at 20M units / year, given the margins they made in 2022, would be something valuable.

[cmurf]

Yeah what is this nonsense? Ketamine nor stupidity explains this. Does he think everyone else is a moron? I guess he must.

3.6B / 100K = 36000 years. It's more like 240M/year to get to 3.6B. The number of human workers isn't flat either. And Tesla isn't going to be making 240M robots a year anytime soon so WTF?

[bdangubic]

the robots are sideshow, people believe (have believed for more than a decade but maybe not people are getting a little bit wiser...) in robotaxis... every tesla investor I know (5 of them) is a believer that tesla's robotaxis will (slowly but surely) take over most of the car transportation in the US. that would be worth some multiple of the current eval - maybe not 100+ but something...

[rsynnott]

> every tesla investor I know (5 of them) is a believer that tesla's robotaxis will (slowly but surely) take over most of the car transportation in the US.

... Why would anyone believe this? Like, even if they suddenly magically jump from level 2 to level 5 (implausible), what's so special about their thing that they'd have a monopoly? If _they_ can do it, the likes of Waymo certainly can.

[JohnFen]

> Does he think everyone else is a moron?

I think he's made it pretty clear that's exactly what he thinks.