Tesla in 2019 and 2020 had a runup from less than $15 per share in 2019 to over $60 by February 21 2020 and then it dropped in half to less than $28.
Tesla was in the process of getting Tesla Model Y up to mass production and then get Tesla Shanghai into ramped production.
Now Tesla in 2024 to 2025 has moved from $144 per share to $488 and now has dropped to about $325 but Tesla is driving over 100,000 miles per month with thousands of Tesla without human drivers.
A hundred thousand Tesla customers summon their FSD capable cars without a driver up to 85 Meters to pick them up every day.
1500+ Tesla cars drive themselves every day without human drivers from factory to loading dock parking lot.
Tesla Chief Designer Hans told Jay Leno that Tesla is testing cybercabs in Texas every day toward the goal of paid robotaxi service in Austin in June 2025.
I think Tesla is still bullish for the year and 2025 is still the year of Robotaxi and Teslabot.
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Putting aside the bad PR effects, I am not sure how investors could still see Tesla as highly valuable. And the main issue for me is that Musk tried really hard to make Tesla an AI company rather than a car company. Car manufacturing has very high entry barriers (you need significant capital investments to build factories to sell in volumes). People thought that AI would be the same with high datacenter costs, but we know that once weights are available, reverse engineering, distillation, retraining, architecture mimicking and deep architecture rebuilding happen within weeks.
And tesla will be forced to distribute the weight: to avoid the risks due to latency, drop in connection, and so on, the cars will have the full FSD weights in the car. And every security consultant will tell you that once you have access to the hardware you can extract the information.
So Tesla will have invested billions, and within weeks, there will be reverse-engineered open source variants improved by communities of hundreds of enthusiasts. Of course, tesla could try to demonstrate that they are the only safe and certified model (like European car manufacturers usually do for safety features), but Tesla and Musk did not go that route. They did not respect certification agencies and standards (to the point of being misleading and being then forced to call their full self-driving “supervised). So how this landscape (completely plausible in my humble opinion) will impact tesla valuation?
(And again I am assuming that there is absolutely no impact on the brand value due to Musk approval)
Regards
Every security consultant will tell you once you have access to the hardware you can extract the information?
Who’ve you been talking to? Drug addled teenagers?
Here, I’ll hand you an iPhone. Please extract all the messages.
Please, post me the private source code for Windows. It’s installed on over a billion computers. I know quite a few hackers who would love to have it.
Your analysis is so flawed its embarrassing.
Regards
George Holtz from Commai Ai (the guy who was developing the self-driving app) is literally the first guy who jailbroke the iPhone, so he would probably disagree with you.
But you are missing the point: your messages are STATIC DADA in storage, they do nothing, and you (usually) may have a hard time extracting them.
If you have FUNCTIONAL data, in other words, a stream of data in response to an input, you extract the behavior providing real (or emulated) input to the hardware, and the behavior is exactly what you need.
You do not need the source code of software to reproduce its functionalities and indeed windows source code has not been released, but multiple levels of emulation have been successfully developed.
The issue that will devalue Tesla is that it is very expensive to develop an AI model from scratch because training is expensive as it goes against entropy. This is because, among all the possible random states, only a few combinations of weights produce the behavior you want. But once you have that set of weights, they can act as filters: you already have examples of the behavior you like, so you are more efficient in your new round of training a network because you are not training a network to understand what is doing, you train a new network just to mimic the output of the first network. This has already been done and proven way cheaper than starting from scratch. Furthermore, for how AI companies built their business case for the data usage, a Tesla competitor (or a hedge fund manager willing to short tesla) might COMPLETELY distill/reverse engineer/ retrain a model based on FSD weights and release their finding FOR FREE for sole research and non-commercial purpose: chat GPT, stable diffusion, LAION and so on managed to exploit tons of copyrighted media for their training in this way: since it was not a for-profit use, it was not copyright infringement.
And once the weights structure is public FSD competitors will emerge quickly because the second aspect of running a model is the inference cost (the processing the model does after you trained it). We know that tesla cars have dedicated hardware, but each car is not a multi-megawatt datacenter, so the inference/processing is not that demanding and is not something modern laptops (and future phones) will not manage (as cars last longer than consumer electronics, consumer electronics in cars tend to be surpassed by what you will find in a store 2-5 years after you bought the car, and this is assuming the car model is brand new based on brand new components, if it is older, there might already be better electronics in circulation).
Please feel free to point out what part of this reasoning you disagree with.
Regards.
Elon’s “far right” ideology
Lets be honest on what ‘far right’ ideology means to the left:
There are only two sexes
Men and women should get married and have children
A government should care for it’s citizens more than immigrants
The sins of the parents do NOT carry on to the children
“Free speech” means you CAN say things that hurt the feelings of others
The left is so insane today that common sense is seen as ‘far right’
Here in Sweden, the media is full of anti Musk articles. If it isn’t that, it’s anti Trump.
If the media is to believed, people are now ashamed of owning a Tesla. That heiling sure did a lot of damage to the Tesla brand.
Reminds me of epic Dr. Strangelove and his involuntary right arm heiling as he explained how the elite could survive in the face of armageddon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZct-itCwPE
If MAGA voters cheer banning the paper straw they are not going to buy electric cars. Elon seems to have alienated everybody else.
He knows who some of his customers are.
And he really knows who his FUTURE customers are. The ones who will buy Model 2/cybertaxi. The ones who will buy the cybertruck. The ones who will buy the Tesla Semi. The ones who will buy the MegaPacks. The ones who will buy his Teslabots.
And expecially the millions who’ll buy Full Self Driving Model Ys because they’re tired of fighting traffic every day.
There are only about 50 Million leftists/progressives in the U.S. Far fewer in Europe and China. They already bought Tesla vehicles, and topped out 2 years ago.
Musk is going after a market of 2 billion people who aren’t leftist/progressive vs. 100 million who are. It’s simple math.
Its MUCH worse than 2020.They had an administration that supported EV’s and no one realized Elon had such a fundamental misunderstanding of who Tesla customers are. They are not coal rolling Trumpsters. They believe global warming is real and that everyone must pitch in and help. If you don’t understand how devastating the damage is that Elon has done to Tesla’s brand, try to remember what happened to Budwiesers brand recently. They sent a special 6 pack to a trans social media influencer and Budwieser drinkers lost their freaking minds! Budwieser had to fire their media staff, preform a a mea culpa and spent 6 months trying to get things back to normal. Musk has done the opposite. He has doubled down on the things so many of his customers oppose. He would have to spend years trying to undo the damage, and he has no interest in doing so. Tesla’s future will be a disastrous quarterly sales report April 2-3. The stock plunges. Then by Memorial Day, according to US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson the new tax bill will be on Donalds desk and will include the repeal of EV buyer credits and all Federal carbon credits. The stock drops again. Then another terrible quarterly sales report due July 2-3. The stock goes off the cliff. By July 18th, Tesla will be at 200$ or less. Buy your shorts now before they get too expensive!
He knows who some of his customers are.
And he really knows who his FUTURE customers are. The ones who will buy Model 2/cybertaxi. The ones who will buy the cybertruck. The ones who will buy the Tesla Semi. The ones who will buy the MegaPacks. The ones who will buy his Teslabots.
And expecially the millions who’ll buy Full Self Driving Model Ys because they’re tired of fighting traffic every day.
There are only about 50 Million leftists/progressives in the U.S. Far fewer in Europe and China. They already bought Tesla vehicles, and topped out 2 years ago.
Musk is going after a market of 2 billion people who aren’t leftist/progressive vs. 100 million who are. It’s simple math.
FYI, the ratio between conservatives and progressives worldwide is about 50-50, swinging between 45-55 or 55-45 depending on specific issues that might be seen as left-leaning or right-leaning in different countries.
So no, the ratio is not two billion vs 100 million.
It is indeed simple math, as demonstrated by government and parliament change in the ruling majorities in almost every democracy every couple of electoral cycles (one notable exception is Japan, which tends to express conservative majorities)
Regards.
Still bullish? Have you factored in the massive decline in Tesla sales in Europe and the United States? These massive declines are caused by Elon’s political activism. Europeans for example are not fond of right wing fascism. Remember that Tesla is overpriced compared to traditional car companies. When the bottom falls out for Tesla, its decline will be rapid and sudden.
I agree. Tesla is going back to a much lower value. Car Sales are dropping in every important market, China, EU, and Canada. FSD is like unclear fusion. Lots of talk; but no production release. Tesla bots already has competition, so not yet a true breakthrough.
Agreed. I’m still in the black, having rebought Tesla at ~$225, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see it go below that again. For tax & sanity reasons, I don’t jump in and out of stocks, but Tesla is a small part of my portfolio so it won’t hurt me either way.
Also, the AI bubble bursting will take Tesla down with it too, as a tech leader with AI in its FSD/robotaxis. Musk has promised AI in future versions of FSD, yet another reboot of FSD to disguise the fact that it’s not perfect and never will be. He should focus on old-fashioned liability issues, not just tech fixes.