The optimus will save the day!

At least that seems the current story. And I mean if it lives up to it's promises, it might. I surely would have a need for a robot servant. But I won't preorder as I a) don't trust it will work as promised b) if it actually works out, I still don't trust Elon enough to put a robot in my home that he controls.

It's amazing to me that Tesla shareholders are not calling for Elon's head.

The stock lives purely on hype, and with the EV market going down the tubes, Optimus (really AI) is the new hype story. Except that Elon is actively stealing Tesla's data for his own company (xAI). He just helps himself to Tesla's GPUs, technology, and data. Tesla didn't bid out their data. They didn't sell it. Elon plundered it into a company in which he owns a larger share.

I'd never buy that stock. I'd short it in a heartbeat if I had any hope of remaining solvent longer than the market remains irrational.

Elon's the only reason the company is worth what it is. If a meteor landed on him tomorrow, their stock would crater.

Not because his presence makes it a better business, but it does make it a better stock.

The stockholders are the ones that believe the Musk hype. So that's why Tesla is a time bomb: they can't get competent leadership without destroying the stock price, and they can't meet their promises without getting competent leadership.

Assuming for a second Optimus is not complete vaporware, and that people will trust Musk with humanoid robots in their home after he said "I'm not building a robot army unless I have control"....

Optimus will face the Roomba problem. Cheaper robots from competitors will destroy any profit margins, and there's zero moat.

And the problem with shorting Tesla has been apparent for years: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

It'd have to be locally controlled, or securely siloed in a cloud, with auditable and accountable interactions. Any sort of home robot will have that challenge; I wouldn't trust any company or person with that sort of access. When even the highest security clearance and most secure facilities and job titles in the world frequently involve people randomly scanning around, trolling through mass surveillance, stalking exes or arbitrary targets, rifling through people's private photos and messages, there's no way a mid-tier tech company job is going to be the one where they suddenly behave ethically and respect security.

That said, robots in factories are a no-brainer, you gain a massive margin over human operated manufacturing, and the technology is effectively at an alpha level of rollout, with more or less full capability of doing any particular thing any human can do, with near perfect repeatability and millisecond granular control, and the effective cost at scale is pennies per year over whatever salary you'd have to pay a human. For municipal jobs, you can get multiple robots to do things like street cleaning, building maintenance, cleaning, facilities maintenance, guard patrols, and so forth. There are all sorts of large scale deployments that are much more compatible with low-trust , low-privacy issues than home robot butlers, and those widely deployed factory and janitor bots will help finance the robo-butlers.

Imagine robot street repair crews that operate on a 24/7 basis, with self driving cars that go around town searching out potholes and other safety issues for the robots to fix. Neighborhood robots that shovel snow or clean out water drains, or trot out with safety cones if a hazard appears. That's millions and millions of dollars in savings year over year compared the cost of paying humans, and it gets rid of the perverse incentives that lead to things like sub-standard materials being used, so that you have to replace materials every year in order to keep the union teams employed doing overpriced roadwork.

Robot contractors that learn from Amish techniques to build a well-made house inside 48 hours, or Earth Day citywide robot blitzes where the robots clean everything, and so on. The economics of things that people won't do, or aren't worth paying to do, change radically when it's a mindless robot's time being allocated.

Even if it's not Optimus, the robots are basically here, the next decade is gonna be full of fun politics and figuring out how to cope with radical change.

"It'd have to be locally controlled, or securely siloed in a cloud, with auditable and accountable interactions. Any sort of home robot will have that challenge; I wouldn't trust any company or person with that sort of access. "

I agree, but we might be in a minority here. Otherwise roombas etc. would not have had their success. Children toys with microphone and always on connection to the company. Cameras as part of a big network. Cars that can be remote controlled any time, ..

I'm slightly optimistic with the heightened scrutiny on AI and general political turmoil - maybe there's a shot at a reasonable digital bill of rights regulation, and both parties seem fairly universally against allowing China to run surveillance apparatus inside US homes. An Alexa or Roomba is one thing, but a humanoid is too close to having an actual person - there's enough of a subjective difference in vibe that it might reach critical mass in the zeitgeist.

US politics is on the "cannot let China win the AI race" side of things, as well as the "cannot have a chinese/corporation/government robot spy in your bedroom" side of things. Cheap Temu speakers with microphones that phone home, or chargers that connect to wifi for botnets, and so on, that sort of abstract IoT threat doesn't resonate. Commander Data doing your dishes feels like a person in your home.

Then again, the people are regarded.

> That's millions and millions of dollars in savings year over year compared the cost of paying humans, and it gets rid of the perverse incentives that lead to things like sub-standard materials being used, so that you have to replace materials every year in order to keep the union teams employed doing overpriced roadwork.

How does it get rid of perverse incentives? The unionised human workers use sub-standard material so they can do (and charge for) the same repair next year, but the owners of the robots do not have the very same incentive?

Is it because humans are mendacious, fallible, and corrupt, while Elon is honest, reliable, and not motivated by money?

> This is the $1T question. What happens when Tesla finally gets valued as a car manufacturer, with side businesses in cheap but unreliable solar, and over-priced grid storage?

They are the 14th largest car maker in the world by annual units sold, and almost in the top 10 by annual revenue from cars.

Surely that is good enough to maintain a market cap that is 50% higher than the combined market caps of the top 10 (Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai-Kia, Renault-Nissan, General Motors, Stellantis, Honda, Ford, BYD, and Suzuki)?

Haha, good point.

But don't forget that they have truly unique skills as a company that none of those other companies can pull off: they have shrinking sales even when focusing on the only segment of cars that's growing: EVs.

That shows unique grit.

Wasn't the model Y the best selling car in the world in 2024?

Yes, slightly edging out the Toyota RAV4. But Toyota also has the Corolla which is also not too far behind the Tesla Model Y. The Camry also does well, typically around #7 or 8 in the top 10 list, whereas the Model Y is the only Tesla in the top 10.

Across all models Tesla sold around 1.8 million in 2024, with 1.2 million of those being Model Ys.

Toyota across all models sold 10.8 million in 2024. Toyota sold more cars just in the US in 2024 (2.3 million) than Tesla sold in the whole world.

Easy to have the best selling car when you sell very few models across your range. Other car companies "dilute" sales of individual models because they have multiple slightly different models targeting different price points in the same segment, for example globally Toyota sells the Highlander/4Runner/Crown Signia/Prado/Landcruiser SUVs, Corolla Cross/RAV4/bZ crossovers, Corolla/Prius/Camry/Crown/Mirai sedans/hatchbacks. Each of these cannibalizes each others sales, but in toto sell more than any single model Tesla sells for a single segment globally.

It appears to have become a meme stock.

I would love to short it but have avoided doing so because I didn't feel like I could outlast the fanatics, which seems to have been a wise decision in hindsight.