If TSLA shouldn’t be considered a car company

Scraping the barrel of silly questions now

Just the Model 3 and Y. In America they are still by far the best selling EVs sadly

Power distribution?

The lucrative flim-flam and chicanery business

Until Ford bribes there way into letting them build a factory to build Chinese EVs.

Useless overpriced robots

Elmo's planet sized ego

Elon's promises.

Why would anyone buy it?

Useless how? They will show up at your job and do your work for you, then they'll come home and do all of the chores around the house. You don't need to work anymore and you'll never have to do dishes or fold laundry. You don't even need savings. We will all be rolling in dough thanks to robots and AI. You'll be so bored you'll want to move to Mars.

And IP.

even wider panel gaps

Pretty sure those don’t exist, at least from a business standpoint.

Promises. Promises that are never met for all eternity.

Useless because they are a guy in a costume or a vr headset.

The debt.

What enterprising university has a major in robot service, sales & repair?

Moving on from cars into a solar and energy storage company would have been a real thing

Nothing just nothing

Unicorn breath

If Tesla sold the car end of the business (manufacturing, factories, inventory, materials) you would just have a software and chip manufacturer. Which is what is valued for. Tesla has always been valued as a tech company and not a car company. The valuation makes no sense otherwise. The value of Tesla is if they can perfect the self driving software and then license it to other car manufacturers. Be the OS for cars. They are also into the chip manufacturing now so you would be like Apple, providing the software and hardware to drive it and install in every car.

The auto loans will remain, along with a lot of unwanted used vehicles. lol

That’s a vastly smaller business, though, and I suspect that a lot of that business is just other Musk companies.

100% corporate puffery!

Nah, they're gonna do everything for us and we'll never have to work again. You'll just get a $500,000 check every year. Trust Elon. He'll make you rich. He for sure isn't interested in making himself rich. He's doing all of this for us.

The idea of Tesla was the combination of cars AND charging station. Imagine if Ford had been the owner of Standard Oil when they introduced the Model A. Even if the income is not that much today, the idea is that it would increase as electric cars are adopted and energy prices go down due to cheaper alternatives of electricity. Ironically, Musk ruined this by stop expanding his charging network for political reasons. So, the hype was worth it initially, now is mainly running on inertia.

I’ve heard this for five or six years. Tesla is valued as a delulu company. Their P/E is like 400/1. Apple and Google are in the 20s/30s, and automakers are like 10/1.  Tesla would have to double their earning four times to be valued like a tech company.

I bet there are dozens of communities that need a Tesla Monorail and just don’t realize it yet.

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Just fact-checked your first sentence, and yes there were 6 Superchargers with the Model S launch, solar powered (remember SolarCity?). They quickly gave-up on that idea.

I’d say Musk ruined his entire business getting into politics.

An empty shell.

What patents do they actually have though?

Tesla will still a energy station monopoly to even try to justify thier value and that was never in the table

I don’t think there’s such a thing as a business that’s genuinely worth as much as Tesla is right now. Even if they took all the taxi business everywhere and sold all the robots

Hype. Hype is forever, apparently.

It still makes no sense. There are companies that already have IP or product in almost every car. Bosch as an example. And there's no reason at all to think others OEMs would value what they get from Tesla more than they do anything else. They're not throwing money at Tesla even if it did somehow perfect self driving.

Now take a look at fastned a dutch provider. Most station with solar canopies and they feature plug and charge as Tesla does. Here in Europe several business offer now nicer and faster chargers. Tesla had a truly great charger network. But today I take a detour to charge elsewhere as Mr Musk repeatedly wanted to cause civil unrest using Twitter.

The juiciest hamburgers and tallest milkshakes in LA.

And Elon should't be allowed to call himself the Founder of Tesla.

Smoke and mirrors, and creative accounting.

Think you missed a step or 2 , why should they not be considered a car company?

Hot air!

The thing is Tesla is still expanding their charging network at about the same rate. He did fire everyone a couple years ago, then he rehired most of them, and it's been chugging along. If you follow DC fast charging installs Tesla is still installing more every week than any other network, but chances are Ionna will overtake them this year (overtake in rate, not total installs). It's not clear what benefit firing the entire team and rehiring them to operate under a different division had to Tesla, but it's definitely no longer being run by a woman who was getting more praise in the press than Elon.

Maybe they could put a guy in a robot suit in every robotaxi to drive them and spin it as a 100 trillion dollar business model right there

> And IP. No one wants their IP. IIRC, early on Elon offered cross licensing terms to anyone IRT EV patents. I don't think anyone took him up on it. This was back when he actually interested in 'saving the planet' (or faked it better). A lot of their early market cap growth was due to his assumption (that so many bought into) that Autopilot/FSD was close to being 'finished' and other manufacturers were already clamoring to license it, or would be soon. Recently he admitted absolutely no car company has interest in it, which is unsurprising, considering it doesn't work, Tesla won't indemnify any licensees, and Tesla still has no idea how much/what hardware will be necessary to 'run' it.

> What patents do they actually have though? They probably have a bunch, but if they do, they're not impeding other manufacturers from progressing, so they're likely not worth much. ETA: AI says Tesla has between 4000 and 7000 patents.

> Moving on from cars into a solar and energy storage company would have been a real thing Tesla is incapable of competing in any business. Their early success in EVs was a combination of a unique plan (don't make low end crap cars - make something like the Model S) and first mover advantage. First mover is hugely valuable, but you need to keep pushing hard to make your products better. Apple is an example of that with cell phones. Like them or hate them, their equipment is top notch, as are their services. Tesla is none of that, for anything.

It should be so obvious to anyone with even a passing knowledge of robotics that bipedal robots will be so expensive to build and maintain that it will be cheaper to just hire actual people. When people break, companies can just replace them. Biorobots.

> I don’t think there’s such a thing as a business that’s genuinely worth as much as Tesla is right now. Not sure what you mean by that, they're not the market cap leader, by a large margin. NVIDIA is. They're the undisputed leaders in providing hardware for AI and have a market cap ~3x Teslas. >Even if they took all the taxi business everywhere Selling taxis, especially at the cut rate prices Elon pretends they'll be able to meet, definitely isn't a trillion dollar idea. > sold all the robots Robots might be, eventually. They won't be until they're cheap and flawlessly good. Regardless, Tesla is way behind a dozen other players in that industry - they'll never make a trillion dollars selling them.

And the snake oil.

How else are the 0.1% going to get their work done?

A Ponzi scheme crossed with a cult.

3-card Monte. If Tesla sells its car manufacturing, it will be to spacex which is currently privately owned. Then spacex does an ipo, grifts a few billion from the public. Tesla then has a spin off of something worthless and the new company takes on all of Tesla’s debt before spacex buys Tesla outright. Musk makes a few billion, and the spin off company files bankruptcy.

Useless overpriced imaginary robots

The real business is a stock promotion company. All of the things it constantly promises to be, but it failed at (solar panels, for example) and all of the things it promises for the future but is actually way behind in (robots, FSD for examples). Whatever new thing Elon can trick simps into believing is all that matters.

A science fraud company.

No, just pictures of robots and dancers in neoprene suits.

Which is 100% euphemistic shysterspeak for "fraud."

From what I've been reading most Testicles are leased. What are they going to do with all those unwanted cars people turn in?

Chips? Software? Where?

Filling a huge bubble.

Something mumble distributed compute mumble mumble. Sell extra cycles for ai!

Musk is on record as being suprised the other car makers weren’t interested in licensing Tesla’s self driving tech. So I guess not a self driving tech company.

Firstly those humanoid type robots need to be made useful. I won't say it's impossible but it's a lot farther into the future than Felon Musk wants his ~~sucker~~investors to believe, at least a generation or two.

"Why does my robot have an Indian accent?"

What "IP". Technology that is all 10-20 years behind their competition?

Yes, their early success was from being the only game in town so they could get away with low-quality crap at luxury prices. Usually that gives companies a huge advantage by grabbing a lot of marketshare but now alternatives are available and that marketshare is shriveling up.

Like Las Vegas.

He’s an idiot because obviously other car companies want to make their own self driving tech. They can see how easy it is to sell a promise.

*It's not clear what benefit firing the entire team and rehiring them to operate under a different division had to Tesla* This seems to be a somewhat common thing with Musk. It seems to go "I don't know what these people do, ergo they're not necessary, fire them." "Why isn't this happening? What do you mean all the people are gone? Dammit, hire them back!"

Um, Tesla is not a chip manufacturer. They get all their chips from TSMC and Samsung. Musk has announced the concept of a plan to build a chip fab, but it will be years before it's operational, assuming they actually do follow thru on it (TSMC started on their Arizona fab in 2020, and they expect completion in 2027 or 2028, so if Tesla starts now they'd be done around 2033, assuming all goes well).

Absolutely. It’s been interesting watching how many generations of robot vacuum cleaner it takes to get a single use robot correct. I can’t imagine how many generations of bipedal robot will be necessary.

TAAS

Wasn't it all just a carbon credits scam in the first place?

Doesn't take even that much. Check out the Texas two-step bankruptcy. He could walk away with everything but the debt.

The best corporate puffery and allocation shell game in the world.

Oh between 4000 and 7000 patents? So the same number IBM creates every year. (market cap 200 billion, 1/6th of Tesla)

It just feels like gimmick to have humanoid robots. Agricultural and logistics are highly automated. Can you imagine how inefficient it would be if they modelled the way that automation worked on how humans did the job before, ignoring the potential robotics had to completely remake how they operate? I can't see these kinds of sci-fi looking robots that can "do anything" ever being as good as a robot designed to do one thing well with the whole process integrated around the technology.

My vacuum found it's way into the trash after little more than a year. It didn't work well at all.

How is your cybertruck ?

Tesla is the new WeWork.

Localised accent package costs extra.

Tesla has $44 billion cash on hand and $14 billion debt. Practically debt free.

This is largely correct, but to actually answer OP's question, this is what you would be left with: 1) An energy generation and storage business that had LTM revenue of 12.771 billion and gross profits of 3.802 billion, and which is still growing over 20% annually.  If you assume the energy business accounts for 15% of the company's total SG&A and R&D and slap a P/E of 30 on it you get a market cap of like 60 billion. 2) An autonomous ride hailing service that is way behind Waymo but could be a competitor in the space.  If you are being really generous you can assume this would eventually be an Uber-sized venture, and that business has a market cap of 150 billion. 3) Theorretically they could license out their autonomous tech to other companies, although it seems unlikely there will be a ton of upside in this given other companies will be able to do the same.  I would maybe say that is worth 20 billion since we are being very generous. 4) Robots - this is basically a product that won't be viable in any real sense for a decade (if ever) so I can't really give it any value.  There could be a world where humanoid robots take on a huge role replacing domestic help or in the medical field, but that is not happening any time soon and there is a very good chance specialized robots (or good old fashioned cheap human labor) will continue to fill those roles better anyway. Given the car business is probably only worth like 50 billion on its own (again being pretty generous given it basically makes zero profit now), I have a really hard time giving Tesla an enterprise value above say 280-300 billion today even under best case scenarios.  A more realistic valuation would probably be more like 100 billion, with about half that coming from the energy business.

And going completely off the deep end around 2020. The "pedo incident" was the first "Uuuuh ... What?!" but beginning of Covid was the "Alright ... He's a goner." It's crazy how he was able to turn me from a huge fan in the 2010's into him being one of the most hated & insufferable human beings on earth to me.

It’s definitely a lesson in managed expectations. The first few generations were trash and they’ve gotten better but they still require constant maintenance and cleaning and getting unstuck from various obstacles. I expect to live for many more decades and if near the end of my life I see practical bipedal robots I’ll be surprised.

It is indeed a gimmick. Humanoid robots are science-fictiony and get people enthusiastic they'll soon have robot butlers like in The Jetsons or whatever, and thereby generate investments. That's all. If it was in any way a serious business plan, you'd have Tesla taking their supposed advancements in robotics and become a competitor in the space of industrial robots (a higher-margin market anyway). Generate revenue and then work towards ever more advanced and cheaper robots until they actually had a home robot. (not totally unlike Tesla's original business plan of starting with a high-margin, low-volume Roadster and then working towards increasingly lower price and more mass-market models - the one good plan Tesla ever had - and not one Musk came up with) But the problem with doing something realistic is that it'll invite comparisons to reality, and real-world competition. Which Musk has given up on (hence they're set to leave the EV market) - he realized he can generate more hype and investments by promising something totally futuristic and unrealistic and then he'll just abandon it in favor of the next promise. Nothing about Optimus makes sense from an engineering or business standpoint, it only makes sense for hype. And I'm not sure it's that great in that realm either. Musk is trying and failing to repeat the early days of Tesla. But I was around - there was a ton of pent-up goodwill towards EVs at the time - a lot of people wanted them, a lot of engineers wanted to build them. There was frustration with old automakers for dragging their feet when it came to EVs. A lot of that was because we knew it could be done. But this isn't the case for humanoid robots. They're cool and all, but so are Zeppelins (who have a small but devoted fandom). But like Zeppelins, it's hard to see how it'd be feasible or technically viable.

Liability through the roof with multiple ongoing court cases. Class action cases. Debt, like I said. also, how much do you trust a known serial liar with financial info? A friend has a bridge for sale if you are interested.

I trust the FCC filings

Enron. They filed too. Somehow it did not work out very well.

And Tesla stock went up 5%

China is already using some to move and stack boxes in warehouses. They are about 50% as efficient as a human but of course they don't need to be paid, don't need breaks, vacations or call in sick and will work 24/7.

If the incident you're referring to is when he called a scuba diver "pedo guy", that meltdown was in 2018. And even before that, he was clearly nuts.

Power company. Foreign laundering operation for Elons favors via SpaceX and starlink for foreign hostile interests!

He probably was but I just wasn't following him close enough to notice, I guess. Since 2020 it's inescapable though.

TSLA shouldn’t be considered….period

Proud of you

So why have multiple CFO resigned? You can be sure the cash doesn't exist.

That was just after the “Roman salute” and I visited the place where an alliance of the willing landed to free Europe from the claws of facism. Many lives were spent and now I can life in a free Europe, a union Mr. Musk seeks to destroy. I know the old stories of the special police knocking on the door searching for hidden humans, to collect and brutally exterminate them. Chilling to the bone. So I hope they go bankrupt and the charging department will be sold to a competitor.

Same as now. Smoke and mirrors.

Good answer! I just looked up, current market cap is 1.5 trillion

No anything publicly traded company is what they do/sell, they are profit centers for shareholders. Tesla is absolutely one of the best examples. Tesla already pushed their current " self-driving" tech to the hilt. All the future speculation keeps them high in value for traders/stockholders

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Yeah it's interesting how it seems to work that way. Guess it takes A LOT of humility to have the money not corrupt you. And apparently only very few people seem to have it. Probably also a bit of a "selection bias" going on here as well as I think it takes some specific character traits to have this obsessive drive to keep going even long after it's not necessary anymore from a financial perspective and probably also needs you to be able to accept "collateral damage" for your success which will be easier for more egocentric character types.

Roy DeMeo made a lot of money exporting to rich countries. Too bad he never paid for them.

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Yeah sure it takes the "selection bias" mostly out of the equation. No need to be a psychopath to be born into the right family.

So you were following him closely enough to be a huge fan, but you weren't following him closely enough to see his dozens of huge red flags? Perhaps you need to work on your observation skills and your ability to think critically.

Yes. Believe it or not there's people in this world who base their image of someone off of the information they have from this person at any given moment and don't spend huge amounts of time to familiarize themselves with every single person or celebrity that they know exists just to be sure that the impression that they have from every person is correct, since it is entirely immaterial to my life whether my image of Mariah Carey or Enrigue Iglesias or Dwayne Johnson is correct. Before the pedo-incident all the information I had from ElMo was positive and the picture this limited information painted was quite good, so you could say I was a fan. The more I dug into it though, fuelled by the pedo incident and whatever garbled mess ElMo decided to tweet from 2020 onwards, the more red flags I uncovered. Now go troll somewhere else you insufferable prick.