Given that Robotaxis are currently crashing at a much higher rate than human-driven vehicles, it seems risky to put a large majority of your company's future earnings and growth in that basket.
On the Optimus front, I spent years in manufacturing. This industry is conservative and deeply relationship driven. Plants prioritize uptime and proven reliability, and they're slow to adopt newcomers. ABB is the 800-pound gorilla here - just as they have been in the PLC space for decades. ABB's long-standing relationships and deep integration support make it incredibly hard for newcomers to gain traction. I should know - I worked for one of their competitors!
Bottom line: Tesla's strategy hinges on two moonshots in industries where incumbents are entrenched and adoption cycles are slow. If these bets don't pay off, Tesla needs a fallback - energy storage, grid solutions, or advanced EV platforms - before the narrative collapses. They'd be wise to leverage their EV business to launch these initiatives, but waning consumer confidence and declining sales make that increasingly difficult.
> Given that Robotaxis are currently crashing at a much higher rate than human-driven vehicles
Robotaxis/cybercabs or whatever are not currently self driving. They’re Level 3, given the requirement for human monitors. To my knowledge, they’re doing fine safetywise as Level 3 systems.
>If these bets don't pay off, Tesla needs a fallback
Good news! No matter what Tesla does, Musk's orbiters will tell you that Tesla isn't a <thing they currently do> company, it's actually a bet on <future, tangentially-related thing>.
Well it kind of is. Tesla are not coy about their plans of moving away from selling consumers personal vehicles. If you think cybercab can eat any significant percentage of Uber/Lyfts lunch there is value.
It takes a lot of hubris to throw away ostensibly worldwide EV dominance. And selling Americans on giving up car/independence culture when compared with Europe or Asia will be tough.
They will undoubtedly crush in the robot and energy space though.
>Last month, Tesla confirmed the fleet had traveled roughly 250,000 miles. With 7 reported crashes at the time, Tesla’s Robotaxi was crashing roughly once every 40,000 miles (extrapolating from the previously disclosed Robotaxi mileage).
>For comparison, the average human driver in the US crashes about once every 500,000 miles.
The capitalization the parent poster used on Robotaxi may have been intentional to assist with interpretation. While it can be a generic term, I believe only Tesla uses it as a brand name: https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi
Robotaxi: Tesla's autonomously driven ride hailing service. Currently using Model Y's or whatever, maybe using Cybercabs once those actually exist, maybe eventually also leveraging Tesla vehicles owned by others (lmao no one who has though that through for more than a minute or two actually wants to risk their vehicle like that)
Cybercab: A Tesla vehicle explicitly built for the Robotaxi service, containing no driver controls whatsoever because they're expected to operate without any (local) human oversight
Elon built up Tesla, to his great credit.
He also has gone out of his way to undermine the car business. He enthusiastically endorsed getting rid of the EV car credit, publicly stating that it would help Tesla.
And his DOGE antics have turned the Tesla brand toxic in the eyes of so many people in the US and around the world.
(I own a Tesla and had many people advice me to sell it or to put a sticker on it to avoid vandalism).
There is no doubt that an important part of Elon's businesses has been setting big bold and exciting goals that attract great talent.
Is there any indication that Elon has messed up talent recruitment like he messed up the Tesla brand for consumers?
They have arrested some. Have heard of Teslas getting keyed too.
My sense is that Elon being less in the spotlight recently has allowed some of the anger he provoked to cool off. But the brand damage, I am afraid, is permanent.
https://www.wcvb.com/article/tesla-vandalism-incidents-conti...
I am unhappy about Tesla's slide. My car is indeed worth less as there uncertainty about the company's ability to provide parts and services long term.
More importantly, Tesla was an American company making cars in the U.S. and leading the world in production and technology of EVs. Musk has stupidly pissed away Tesla's position and ceded it to Chinese companies. Perhaps this sounds overly nationalistic, but leading in one of the key industries of the coming decades in the U.S. would have been good for the country.
The police are underfunded and understaffed since Covid here in Silicon Valley. They won’t pursue your vandalism cases if they are just the value of a car.
And how much worse would Tesla sales be without tariffs and protectionism in the U.S. and Europe?
It is sad to see how Musk has pissed away Tesla's technological leadership. Those BVD and Huawei cars make the Tesla product look outdated at this point.
If Waymo or BYD (or Mercedes or GM, lol) get to Level 5 before 2030, and Tesla is still struggling with Level 4, the door shuts. Cameras-only autonomy starts getting banned. (We may see it sooner in e.g. China, India, the EU, and New York and California as a result of Trump-Musk politics.)
That said, it’s a Musk company, so downside is capped. If it fell below $100 to 500bn, xAI or SpaceX will buy it.
Does anyone pay for Grok? Despite claims of profitability, SpaceX still needs huge investments despite having spent all the lunar lander money without producing anything more than a render. Tesla is valued at more than the rest of the car industry put together, even after two years of stagnation and collapsing margins. Though it overlaps the AI bubble, Elon accounts for more of a general tech bubble than anyone else. Oracle might crash and burn first, but the Elonverse is the really big bubble.
SpaceX is in fact not profitable. Depending on how you price internal transactions for manufacturing and launching Starlink satellites you can fudge the hell out of the term "cash flow positive." In fact, SpaceX continued to take outside investments in 2025.
> Depending on how you price internal transactions for manufacturing and launching Starlink satellites you can fudge the hell out of the term "cash flow positive.”
This is nonsense. In accrual accounting, yes, there is room for fuckery. In cash accounting, you can shift cash around within the system, but the system is cash constrained.
SpaceX is cash-flow positive.
> SpaceX continued to take outside investments in 2025
Sure. It raised in its Series J. It has bought back more than that total round, secondary included, in stock.
It will probably raise massive amounts in 2026. It’s making large capital investments.
But for a few years, it didn’t. It was largely coasting. And in those years, up to now, it’s been cash-flow positive. It could have paid a dividend if it wanted.
Relatively recently Aerojet Rocketdyne valued ULA at about $2 billion. Do you think SpaceX is worth 10 times as much? That seems reasonable. How about 50 times as much? That's stretching it but, hey, it's Elon. 100 times as much? How about 700 times as much as ULA?
Didn't ULA launch something like 75-90 tons to orbit last year, vs. 2400 tons for SpaceX?
So SpaceX would be worth 27x just from payload even if the profit margin was the same, even if they weren't the cheapest launch vehicle and therefore a natural provider for all the mega-constellations that want to compete with Starlink in coming years, and even if they didn't have this plausible (allbeit definitely work-in-progress) vision for their even better margin space truck that is Starship + Superheavy?
All Musk's valuations are based on his visions for what could be. It's just that for SpaceX, unlike for X and Tesla, "what could be" still seems plausible.
For Tesla… there is the argument that while "what could be" is very unlikely, if he pulls it off then it is also very valuable. But I not only don't think he can pull it off at all, even if he could don't think he will have market dominance sufficient to justify the price.
SpaceX… may have similar risks, depending IMO more on Chinese companies thinking "Great idea, let's do that but better" than e.g. European companies doing that. But even with that, 27x for current launches, and an additional 3x combined with that for other constellations plausibly gets them to around x80 even if Starship continues to not be reusable.
Starship is a big question mark for me. Assume it works: Would it be cheap enough to induce demand? Dunno. Not implausible, but I really don't know, and that is needed to get up to 700x.
ULA has zero growth prospects and no high-margin telecom business. I’m doubtful it would sell for even $2bn if auctioned off tomorrow.
More to the point: valuation is relatively independent of whether a business is cash-flow positive. (Totally independent in the case of practically-unlevered companies like SpaceX.)
Did they move to Texas and spend $300m getting Trump elected?
Did they pander disrespectfully and partisanly?
Is that selling electric cars to Republicans?
Did they build a "cyber" puss-APC product for the wider market and then piss it away on the largest steel stamping machine in Texas, nay the world (which is a single point of failure for production and maintenance)?
Someone should explain to them that there are less hazardous batteries than Lithium Ion.
It's like there's a freeloading pandering narcissist who's assumed Elon's identity (because they were such a risk to other operations where there is not such accountability to a board and to the people).
On the Optimus front, I spent years in manufacturing. This industry is conservative and deeply relationship driven. Plants prioritize uptime and proven reliability, and they're slow to adopt newcomers. ABB is the 800-pound gorilla here - just as they have been in the PLC space for decades. ABB's long-standing relationships and deep integration support make it incredibly hard for newcomers to gain traction. I should know - I worked for one of their competitors!
Bottom line: Tesla's strategy hinges on two moonshots in industries where incumbents are entrenched and adoption cycles are slow. If these bets don't pay off, Tesla needs a fallback - energy storage, grid solutions, or advanced EV platforms - before the narrative collapses. They'd be wise to leverage their EV business to launch these initiatives, but waning consumer confidence and declining sales make that increasingly difficult.