Comment by al_borland
16 hours ago
That might be a little extreme. Tesla is making electric cars and robots. These are very much things of the future.
GameStop is buying and selling used games, which is becoming impossible as consoles keep pushing for digital games.
GameStop requires a major shift in their business model to stay relevant, while Tesla just needs to hope the public doesn’t reject the idea of electrics cars out of stubbornness or politics.
While there is a lot of hype baked into both stocks, it seems like hype with Tesla is founded in more reality than the GameStop hype.
Didn’t they just announce their profits dropped like 45% year over a year?
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/tesla-earnings-profit-q4-2...
They’ve been overvalued for a very very long time. And then the head of the company decided to alienate as many people as possible. All while pouring a ton of resources into a product that very few people want instead of saner things.
Sure but they also beat earnings and revenue targets, and the stock price rose. I think it was expected for EV profits to drop when the tax credit left
Electric cars, maybe. Tesla is valued much larger than the rest of the auto industry combined though.
Humanoid robots? Ain’t nobody made the business case for that. It is pure vibes.
Are you seriously saying there is no business case for humanoid robots?
Robots yes. Humanoid ones? Why? So people can be amazed? Purpose built robots are the future. The human form is sub optimal for most enterprise use cases.
I always wonder why those robots have to be humanoid.
I swear I don't need a humanoid robot, give me a proper autonomous robot that cleans your house and I'm more than happy. Could be 40 cm tall, and look like a box, I don't care.
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I think the technology is just not there to make the business case for humanoid robots. It’s like the VR. Everyone would like to use VR but the tech is just not good enough. Same with FSD. The robots may be 10-20 years away from actual being good enough. If Elon can trick people for 20 years like he did with FSD then he may have a business case for humanoid robots
I have no particular idea whether there's a business case for humanoid robots or not. I would love to have the argument set out well. Perhaps you'd indulge my curiosity.
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Maybe there is. But isn’t Tesla way, way behind Hyundai at this? It’s not even close? Yet Hyundai’s stock is still very cheap..
No, I’m saying they haven’t made the case. Or at least the case that is being presented and sold to investors is complete BS.
For example, I work in deep tech and pay attention to the manufacturing industry. The idea that humanoid robots will replace, streamline and revolutionize manufacturing is a joke in that community. They’ve already long since replaced the humans with CNC machines, industrial (non-humanoid) robots, and 3d printing.
The humanoid robotics craze is a lot like the crypto craze. Pure vibes and motivated reasoning. Like crypto, there is actual value there, but way out of proportion to the hype.
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If you think our current tech stack is anywhere close to making humanoid robots viable, then you might as well buy Tesla stock.
Not for what they currently cost and are capable of.
There's a huge business case! There's also a major business case for teleportation, which seems about as likely to happen under a Musk-led company.
There was a "business case" for $25,000 EVs before China did it, and Tesla conveniently pivoted. It's 2026, anyone who's watching the game knows the score.
No, they're probably saying you're that believer that will buy the dip.
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Tesla is valued at more than the auto industry because they are doing more than the entire auto industry.
Honda is going to come out with a new Civic next year. It's going to look like the old Civic.
Tesla is trying to create self driving taxis to make the rest of the auto industry obsolete.
If you think that can happen, they should be worth more than the rest of the industry.
> Tesla is trying to create self driving taxis to make the rest of the auto industry obsolete.
This is a pretty baffling take. Most people in the world operate their own cars, and even if taxis were free, a large portion of them would continue to operate their own cars because it's convenient.
Taxis also don't replace a good chunk of the new vehicle market. People driving fleet trucks aren't going to work out of taxis. The top selling vehicles in the USA are pickup trucks, and it isn't even close.
Lastly, even if they succeed, competition will catch up and the market will be saturated.
In 20 years, people will still be buying the humble Civic. While the next 20 years at Tesla will probably be a string of market failures and wacky promises of personal space craft or some shit.
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> Tesla is trying to create self driving taxis to make the rest of the auto industry obsolete.
They are one of many organisations trying to do that and they are not the most successful at it.
Honda have been making humanoid robots since the 1980s.
Well, check Hyundai as well. They do more than cars as well including robots(Boston Dynamics). Tesla is not doing anything special. It was the only EV someone could use but it’s no longer the case. Now it tries to go the robots way but it’s not the same as the EV was. There are tones of humanoid robot companies, some more advanced than whatever Tesla is cooking
It can happen. Its unlikely Tesla will catch up to Waymo any time soon though. Yet valuation for Tesla (relative to how much money they are making) is massively higher than Google’s. Which would make very little sense following this logic?
We're missing a part of the case though: why do you need to be a car-maker to be the vanguard for self-driving taxis?
The best case scenario for a self-driving company would be to target software and sensor solution packages that they can sell or license to other manufacturers. Such a vendor can focus on the self-driving problem and not have to bother with things like "we found a surprisingly big market niche for a 11-passenger minibus, but no platform for it" or "to sell it in the EU we need the headlights to be 5cm lower". I'd expect the margins are also a hell of a lot higher if they don't have to include two tonnes of steel with each auto-driver license they sell.
Maybe they build a small number of test mules, or just chop-shop a few off-the-shelf cars as a R&D fleet, but they hardly need to be a seven-figures-per-year manufacturer to be supplying those needs.
That's even assuming they come out green in the competition to deliver robotaxis. Right now the leading player in the US market is a company who is neither Tesla nor a legacy vehicle manufacturer. It's an adtech who started gluing the contents of a Radio Shack onto the worst cars you could possibly think of (Chrysler Pacificas and Jaguar i-Paces? Really?) and turned it into something that's an everyday thing in several major cities.
Tesla FSD story reminds me of the fracas that was early OS/2. IBM sold people 286 hardware on the promise of it running OS/2, so they had to waste a lot of effort building a 286-capable OS/2 that was clunky and almost immediately obsolete. No matter how talented Tesla's R&D team are, they're walled in by design choices made on existing vehicles (i. e. relying on cameras instead of lidar). I wonder if they'd be better off being ran as an arm's length startup to address the problem more generically, and then they can sell it to other firms if it turns out that the best solution won't work on existing Tesla hardware.
They are actually behind in a lot of their self driving to other car companies
> These are very much things of the future.
I thought it was hyperloop. I thought it was suboribital taxis. I thought it was underground taxis. I thought it was self-driving semi trucks. Or was it solar roofs? Or powerwall? Wait weren't we supposed to be on the moon again right now?
He's a bullshitter. Yea, he picks good targets, but he is entirely full of shit. The market just does not reflect this. He should have been golden parachuted onto a yacht years ago.
To his credit he also delivers, sometimes.
X kind of works. XAi kind of works. You can say it is all kind of broken but it works. People predicted X will collapse just a few months ago!
StarLink is really popular now, and it didn't exist few months ago.
He can still do things. People are betting on that.
Now if you ask me, Tesla is still his biggest moneymaker and collapse of Tesla sales will be catastrophic for his empire.
> X kind of works.
It is less popular and makes less money than when he acquired it, and that is ignoring the fact that it is a cesspool of racism now.
Tesla's sales are standing still in a growing market. Are they GameStop? Maybe not, but they still require a major shift or their competitors will leave them behind in the dirt.
They are making things but the case for them being worth an order or magnitude more than a normal EV company is getting weaker by the day
This was true when Tesla was primarily in the market of making electric cars. It is not true if their business is humanoid robots: that's squarely meme stock territory.
Tesla's valuation is not related to their production of cars or robots.
refrigirators then? some other household appliances? what exactly is “thing de jour” tesla is today?!
BYD made 35% more electric cars than Tesla and its market cap is about 1/10th.
Tesla's valuation has no grounding in any physical goods it manufactures.
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imagination and feelings
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The current administration is “rejecting the idea of electric cars out of stubbornness or politics.” See: Trump moving to withhold funding for EV chargers, terminating EV mandates and government support, etc. I don’t know what Musk is thinking by supporting this administration so steadfastly as they work hard to undermine his own efforts and initiatives.
I'm not making any specific assertions about what's in Musk's heart. I can draw some conclusions from his behaviors, actions, and words, but that's neither here nor there.
I will say, though, that there is a longstanding tradition, certainly in the United States, of an in group hurting their own material interests to deprive an out group of that same thing. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2021/02/15/public-pools-us...
Musk got what he needed at the expense of losing some tax incentives for his customer base. He was able to shut down government investigations into him/his companies. That alone should have been worth quite a salary bump.
It's pure politics: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/genera...
The people behind the Diesel won and now are moving the money flows their way. See GM stock.
tesla is not making robots.
They are making no robots.
What robots are they making?
Where can you buy one? What does it do?
The only thing keeping Tesla afloat currently is tariffs and restrictions on far cheaper and far better foreign alternatives. That's not a solid foundation. It's certainly not a trillion dollar company.
The dam is breaking. We have Canada lowering tariffs and agreeing to allow the import of Chinese EVs (limited, at least to start with) and the US administration goes off on Canada for doing it because they know what it means: crumbling American influence.
South America, Africa and Asia are likely forever lost to Tesla. And European sales are tumbling.
The supercharger network will maintain some inertia for some time but only for so long.
You can see this in Tesla announcements about attempts to diversify. AI robots? I'll believe it when I see it. Robotaxis? Well you're reliant on FSD for that and you have stiff competition in Waymo and who knows what China is cooking up there.
The GP was correct: it's a meme stock. It's no longer an investment in a business. It's an investment in Elon and, more generally, an investment in the administration. There's no fundamental way to predict how that goes and on what time scale. If you want to gamble, gamble. But gamgling is what it is. And, just like Twitter, I guarantee you the people at the top won't be left holding the bag.
BYD makes electric cars. Not sure if Trump will let you import them.
Nor will any American president. Detroit would collapse overnight (again).