Comment by Rover222
17 hours ago
The current valuation is largely driven by a future in robotics, not in traditional consumer vehicles. Both in driverless cars and the humanoid form factor. There is not another US company with anything near the position of tesla in terms of vertical integration, in-house self driving technology, manufacturing advancements, ambitious leadership, engineering talent, etc etc.
Chinese companies are the only large threat on the horizon.
> current valuation is largely driven by a future in robotics
It probably isn’t, given Tesla has no unique lead in robotics and its recent news of setbacks didn’t move the market.
Tesla stock is a bet on Musk. It’s why the Board pays him hundreds of billions of dollars to not lose focus on a business he’s very obviously bored with.
No unique lead on robotics, except the largest fleet of self driving cars by several orders of magnitude, the largest training cluster, custom silicon, experience in mass produciton and vertical integraiton, a much more ambitious Optimus program than the causal headlines would have you know about...
> No unique lead on robotics, except the largest fleet of self driving cars by several orders of magnitude
Not correct to call advanced driver assist self driving when we have an actual self-driving fleet in Waymo.
> experience in mass produciton and vertical integraiton
This remains Tesla's sole actual advantage. If (probably when) someone else beats them up the tech tree, chances are Tesla could beat them to scale.
> a much more ambitious Optimus program than the causal headlines would have you know about
The talent bleed at Tesla (specifically, Optimus) contrasts with e.g. SpaceX's virtual monopoly on aerospace talent excellence in America, possibly broader. And it shows. SpaceX routinely does the unprecedented. It's been years since Tesla did anything first.
(If I had to look at Musk's portfolio, SpaceX is where his soul is. It, Neuralink and xAI are where his heart is. X f/k/a Twitter was a clusterfuck from the get go, but it makes sense as a data pump for Grok, and he has fun with it so whatever. Boring Company has quietly failed, and may need to be acquired into SpaceX to rescue investors. Tesla increasingly looks like it's out of touch, too. My guess is he waits for the valuation to temper and then merges it into a private xAI.)
Last I checked there are zero self-driving Teslas.