Summarizer

A 10MW data center would require square kilometers of solar arrays, even in space. It’s just as real as the 25k Model 3.

Hmm, Elon really did run that flywheel pretty well. He built the Roadster to drum up some cash and excitement so he could develop the Model S, then he used that success to do the Model X, and then he expanded capacity to develop the 3 and Y, and he reinvested the profits to develop the Model 2, finally bringing EVs to the masses, displacing ICEs everywhere, and becoming the undisputed leader of both EV and battery manufacturering. Oh wait, that didn’t actually happen, because he got distracted or something? He doesn’t really have battery capacity worth writing home about, the Chinese are surpassing Tesla in EV manufacturing, and Waymo is far ahead in self-driving. The amazing space computation cost reduction process sounds rather more challenging than the Model 2, and I’m not sure why anyone should bet on Elon pulling it off.

> Oh wait, that didn’t actually happen Not sure how you can say that. Nothing lasts forever, especially in the face of Chinese market dumping, but for a while there Tesla really was the undisputed king of EV manufacturing, that flywheel is how he got there, he did release all the patents because he said from day one he didn't anticipate or aim for 100% market share for Tesla and assumed there'd always be lots of EV manufacturers in future. All that sounds like - mission accomplished? As for Waymo being ahead, maybe today. But Waymo's tech stack is largely pre-DL, they rely heavily on unscalable techniques like LIDAR and continuous mapping. Tesla is betting big on the "scale up neural networks" model we know works well and their FSD can drive everywhere. They're perhaps behind Waymo in some ways, but they're also in different markets - Waymo won't sell anyone a self driving car and Tesla will. I wouldn't count them out. Their trajectory is the right one. > I’m not sure why anyone should bet on Elon pulling it off. PayPal, SpaceX existing at all, then doing reusable rockets, Tesla, FSD, large scale battery manufacturing, Starlink, X ("he can't fire 80% of employees it'll crash immediately"), robotics, training a SOTA LLM so fast even Jensen Huang was shocked ... the man consistently pulls off impossible seeming things in the face of huge skepticism. How many examples does it take before people start taking the guy seriously? Infinity examples?

I really find the goalpost moving is shocking.. Paypal is in no way a Musk creation, no one makes that claim and in fact they got rid of him quite quickly. X has plummeted in value, and is worth a fraction of what he paid for it? How is this "pulling it off" by shrinking the user base, revenue, etc? While we don't have publicly audited figures, they announced a net loss for the first three quarters of 2025, while it posted profits prior to his purchase. FSD isn't even real? Why would you cite a feature that doesn't actually exist as an example of "Elon pulling it off"? He promised FSD would be available over a decade ago, and it's still not real. > How many examples does it take before people start taking the guy seriously? I'd personally settle for real examples, and not the false ones cited above.

We must be living in parallel universes. Tesla invested into the first Lotus roadster - and put that cash into the S then the X. Used that cash to build the worlds largest factories and make the 3 & Y which sold at enormous volumes - so large in fact that the S & X are now tiny single percentages of sales which is why Tesla is stopping manufacturing them now. Tesla is one of the very few vehicle manufactures which makes a profit manufacturing vehicles. Tesla throws off cash which allows the flywheel to keep spinning. Tesla is now operating fully autonomous rides. They've constantly proved their naysayers wrong at every turn in time. What the Chinese are doing in battery tech is irrelevant to US vehicles as they will never be allowed to sell in the US which is Teslas largest market. The model 2 has the possibility of being profitable at insanely low purchase price which has the potential to completely disrupt the economics of US sales in such a way that legacy auto could well be bankrupt in 5-10 years. Who will be making Waymo's vehicles then?

The Model 2 vehicle program was killed[1]. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

> the 3 & Y which sold at enormous volumes Tesla isn't even in the top 15 auto manufacturers by volume? The largest manufacturer Toyota produces 9x the cars Tesla does. Tesla is also on a multiyear sales drop with no sign of sales improvement. The top 15 car makers produced 70 million cars, to Tesla's 1.7m. They have no enormous volume, at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_manufacture... If Tesla's stock traded in line with its competitors, its a $30-40B company. The hype around future growth (now completely off the charts) is the only reason the stock price is out of line with reality. There is no reason to expect Tesla's sales figures to improve going forward, in fact, they will continue to decrease. > Tesla throws off cash which allows the flywheel to keep spinning Tesla had a profit of $3.8b in 2025 (this is a 46% drop from 2024 and a second year over year drop). It's revenue was $94b (also less than 2024), which places it 12th among auto manufacturers. It's profit is 6th, which is a decent margin compared to legacy makers, but as mentioned above, the profit is plummeting as Tesla struggles to sell cars. It's revenue among all global companies is not even in the top 100. It does not "throw off cash", the business is in a tailspin. >They've constantly proved their naysayers wrong at every turn in time Musk has been promising full self driving mode is within six months to a year away. He first made those claims in the mid 2010s? Do Tesla's have full self driving mode in 2026? There is a decade long trail of failed claims from Musk and Tesla. In 2019, Musk predicted 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road by 2020. How many Tesla robotaxis are on the road in 2026? Fifty? One hundred? It's a rounding error compared to the claim that they'd have a million in 2020... Musk said in 2019 that he believed Tesla vehicles were not traditional depreciating assets and instead could appreciate because they contained future-value technologies, especially Full Self-Driving (FSD): “I think the most profound thing is that if you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying an appreciating asset — not a depreciating asset.” In fact, Tesla's are among the worst depreciating vehicles on the market today, their depreciation compares to the low end car market of Nissan, Hyundai and other low quality manfacturers. Elon projected 250-500k Cybertruck sales per year. In reality, they sold 38k in 2024, and just 16k in 2025. >They've constantly proved their naysayers wrong at every turn in time

> Tesla is now operating fully autonomous rides. There's been a lot of reporting saying otherwise. Still requiring follow cars. FSD is still trying to kill the driver at random.

Hey remember that time someone had their Tesla running down the highway and the superior self-driving capability failed to see an 18 wheeler that crossed the road and the person was decapitated and there are videos of that complete with blood spray?

On the other hand, Tesla vehicles have similar hardware built into them, and don't require such hands-on intervention. (And that's the hardware that will be going up.)

Car-grade inference hardware is fundamentally different from data center-grade inference hardware, let alone the specialized, interconnected hardware used for training (like NVLink or complex optical fabrics). These are different beasts in terms of power density, thermal stress, and signaling sensitivity. Beyond that, we don't actually know the failure rate of the Tesla fleet. I’ve never had a personal computer fail from use in my life, but that’s just anecdotal and holds no weight against the law of large numbers. When you operate at the scale of a massive cluster, "one-in-a-million" failures become a daily statistical certainty. Claiming that because you don't personally see cars failing on the side of the road means they require zero intervention actually proves my original point: people who haven't managed data center reliability underestimate the sheer volume of "rare" failures that occur at scale.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2017792776415682639 For what it's worth, this project plans to use Tesla AI5/AI6 hardware for the first launches.

Not only the sibling comments points, but cars aren't exposed to the radiation of space...

This is the moving force behind all investments of the past decade or so. Crypto? Everyone involved knows it's empty, but they hype it up anyway because they believe some people buy the bullshit, and plenty of people gobble it up and signal boost it because they think they're ahead of the pack. NFTs, same thing. Tesla stocks was probably the one that started it. Pokemon cards.

He just says shit that sounds smart and then rides the vibes to financial success, but it's not working anymore. 10 years ago when Tesla actually revolutionized the retail EV industry everyone took his word for it. Then after a few failed prognostications the nerds started to doubt his credibility, a few more years of this and the tech press started to see through it, and now he's reduced to only the MAGA-faithful falling for his Phony Stark act. The ground is coming up fast.

It's a derogatory comment among certain types of technical employee, I would agree. Not so much amongst those in leadership or softer roles. I wouldn't put cybertruck in the win column personally

He gets away with it for one reason only, and because he consistently delivers good returns on capital. Most of Tesla's revenue derives from Model Y and FSD subs. I agree that Cybertruck was a marketing ploy. Don't think it was ever intended to be materially revenue generating.

I note that their accomplishments tend to be in the past, prior to his Twitter addiction absorbing his attention. Tesla is a solid decade late on FSD, cutting models, and losing market share rapidly thanks to his influencer stunts. SpaceX has a solid government launch business, which is great, but they’ve been struggling with what’s been the next big thing for a while and none of that talk about Mars has made meaningful progress. Boring Company, Neurolink, etc. show no signs of profit anytime soon no matter how cool they sound. Being ambitious is good to an extent but you need to be able to deliver to keep a company healthy. Right now, if you’re a sharp engineer you are looking at Tesla’s competition if you want to work on a project which doesn’t get cancelled (like it’s cars) and the stock price being hyped to the moon means that options aren’t going to be as competitive.

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” - John Maynard Keynes

Why would you short the stock?

As if company performance actually affected stock price when it comes to anything Elon Musk touches. For fuck's sake, TSLA has a P/E of a whopping *392*. There is zero justification for how overvalued that stock is. In a sane world, I should be able to short it and 10x my money, but people are buying into Musk's hype on FSD, Robotaxi, and whatever the hell robot they're making. Even if you expected them to be successes, they'd need to 20x the company's entire revenue to justify the current market cap.