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It's pretty safe to say that after a decade of unfulfilled projections and promises, the Tesla EV fantasy is now a bust. So now it's off to new fantasy --- rob

It's pretty safe to say that after a decade of unfulfilled projections and promises, the Tesla EV fantasy is now a bust. So now it's off to new fantasy --- robotaxi. The problem with this fantasy --- ride hailing isn't nearly as profitable as auto manufacturing. Half the world isn't going to ditch their autos in favor of robo rides any time soon. This is what it will take to justify Tesla's current outlandish stock price. Uber P/E is about 20. Tesla P/E is around 170. Can Tesla ride hailing be 6 times bigger/more profitable than Uber in the near future? I personally don't think so.

leoqa 1y ago
I have been paying about (premium lost from rolling puts) 1k/month for the last 4 months to short Tesla. I made about 12k on the last dip so I’m profitable but I’m just waiting for the bubble to burst. Today I doubled down when it went up, hoping to one day see it fail.
- cbeach 1y ago
  Whereas on the other hand I've gained handsomely from holding Tesla stock for many years, and plan to hold it for many more years. It feels good to support American-made sustainable technology that has revolutionised the electric car and battery storage markets. I struggle to understand those who would short-sell Tesla, unless they have some kind of emotional hangup against Elon Musk or government efficiency?
  - Hamuko 1y ago
    What exactly have you gained from holding?
    - cbeach 1y ago
      I own stock that is worth many times what I paid for it, and any time I want to, I can exchange the stock for cash. Unless perhaps I missed something about how the stock market works?
  - TimorousBestie 1y ago
    > I struggle to understand those who would short-sell Tesla, unless they have some kind of emotional hangup against Elon Musk or government efficiency? It’s objectively clear that the company is in a bad market condition, and you don’t need to have an “emotional hangup against Elon Musk or government efficiency” to know it’s bad business to alienate your potential customer base and deliver shockingly bad public appearances. If Ford’s CEO was stumbling-down drunk or higher than a kite at a presser, I’d short Ford too.
    - cbeach 1y ago
      Musk was never a conventional squeeky-clean ultra-safe stage-managed CEO that speaks through a media team. That didn't stop him from raising the value of $TSLA from a penny stock to one of the largest companies in the world. With his initial investment, and with him as the product architect of the first Tesla vehicle (the Roadster), he transformed an academic project with no products to the world's most valuable automaker. An automaker so valuable, it's worth more than Toyota, BYD, GM, VW, BMW, Mercedes, Ford and Honda COMBINED. People have shorted $TSLA before because they underestimated Musk, and let their own personal affectations cloud their understanding of Tesla's potential, and Musk's singular genius.
      - ceejayoz 1y ago
        > An automaker so valuable, it's worth more than Toyota, BYD, GM, VW, BMW, Mercedes, Ford and Honda COMBINED. This doesn't give you the slightest bit of pause?
        TimorousBestie 1y ago
        It can’t; this is how meme stocks operate. If too many traders examine their motives and revert to trading rationally, the stock price corrects accordingly.
        robocat 1y ago
        > meme stock Poor explanation since ~50% stock is owned by institutions. I think retail holds 38% of ownership. Rest of ownership is mostly Elon ~13%. indexed fund ownership doesn't explain institutional holdings. Tesla is 5% of NASDAQ 100 by market cap. Vanguard owns 7.7%, BlackRock owns 6.4%. Disclaimer: not a financial analyst and I might have numbers wrong (mostly from Tiger Trading App).
  - foogazi 1y ago
    > I struggle to understand those who would short-sell Tesla, unless they have some kind of emotional hangup against Elon Musk Wait, do you have an emotional hangup FOR Elon Musk ? > or government efficiency? Is this satire ?
Panzer04 1y ago
If robotaxis were commensurately cheap and available I'd happily dump my car. I don't see it happening for another decade or more, though.
- water-data-dude 1y ago
  I might do the same if they weren’t a privacy nightmare. The tech company running the robotaxi service would need to buck some Silicon Valley trends before I’d use their product
- jqpabc123 1y ago
  The robotaxi sales pitch is an inherent contradiction --- robo rides will be safe, readily available, cheap --- and wildly profitable. Maybe pick one or two of these at best but all of the above is highly unlikely. What makes this unlikely is simple marketplace competition. Just as unlikely as Tesla conquering the auto manufacturing market.
atonse 1y ago
> Half the world isn't going to ditch their autos in favor of robo rides any time soon. I don't know. Take cities like Bangalore (India) for example. I don't live there but do occasionally visit family every couple of years. And I consistently hear a general sentiment of "I just take Uber because the traffic is insane. But the traffic is insane because of too many Ubers" But in all of that sentiment, nobody's saying "I wish I could drive instead" – they're more than happy to have someone drive them around if it's cheap enough. That was true with Auto Rickshaws, and it's even more attractive in an air conditioned car. If taxis get cheaper, people will use them in even more situations, like daily commutes. Why not? And what do you mean by "EV Fantasy" – I get if you meant Robotaxi or self-driving fantasy. But there are hundreds of thousands of Teslas (maybe a million?) driving around the world isn't there? Are all these people imagining that they're driving a Tesla EV? Which part of it is a fantasy?
- Spooky23 1y ago
  The US isn't like that. The people with the money for the magic taxi are in the burbs. The fantasy that any of this nonsense is a sustainable business, especially when the charismatic leader completely FUBARed his government hobby project and is biting the hand that feeds him. Tesla's biggest source of revenue is the US government.
  - popularonion 1y ago
    Suburbs and commuter towns desperately need Robotaxi - there’s literally no other option. Public transit isn’t coming, Waymo isn’t coming, Uber and Lyft are shrinking Even a US city of 100,000 people, it can be really tough or impossible to get an Uber - good luck getting a ride from the airport at 12:30 in the morning
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      If you can't afford a car, time to migrate. The economics of the magic robot taxi aren't going to save you.
    - bryanlarsen 1y ago
Hamuko 1y ago
Don't forget: they're also on the humanoid robot fantasy.
SilverBirch 1y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by Tesla's EV fantasy being a bust? In the last decade they've got from delivering 75k cars a year to delivering 1.8m cars a year. It's not a fantasy, it happened. Now, the stock price isn't based on the reality of the fundamental economics of a car company, but they didn't fail with EVs, they succeeded.
- cbeach 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - justinrubek 1y ago
    Your theory is just not correct, particularly given that Biden and Harris are right-wing politicians.
    - omnimus 1y ago
      I guess (in US) left means left of Trump. Which Biden/Harris very slightly are.
  - organsnyder 1y ago
    This isn't about ideology. It's about Musk behaving like a toddler. No way I'd make such a significant purchase from a company led by someone that volatile.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    > I blame the Left for being completely intolerant of anyone and any company that doesn't strictly adhere to their ideology. This is deeply, deeply silly to assert in 2025 as the right attempts to shut hobble the Ivy League, the NIH, prominent public policy law firms, green card holders writing op-eds, etc.
    - homefree 1y ago
      [flagged]
vel0city 1y ago
Robotaxi isn't even a new fantasy. In April 2019 Elon Musk said Model 3's would make their owners money participating in the autonomous ride-hailing fleet.
- jqpabc123 1y ago
  He forgot to mention one small little detail --- owners would have to ride along to supervise their "autonomous" vehicle. Otherwise, they will be sued for negligence when (not if) the "Full Self Driving" screws up.
thinkingtoilet 1y ago
The decline has nothing to do with projections and promises and everything to do with Elon alienating a huge part of potential customers. I was someone who went from wanting a Tesla to never buying one as long as Elon own a single share in the company.
- cbeach 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - fires10 1y ago
    For some people it isn't 'just politics'. They feel threatened by potential loss of freedom and life. If it was just a disagreement on tax rates or some government spending it would be different. His views are against someone else's existence.
  - justinrubek 1y ago
    Weird to see people downplay the significance of the degree of differing political opinions. This isn't a simple matter of disagreeing. I would be willing to bet that every single vehicle company CEO has drastically different takes on these things than I do. They stay out of the way, though.
  - thinkingtoilet 1y ago
    1. Hondas are not inferior cars. 2. It's not about "different political opinions", it's far beyond that and to suggest so tells anyone reading your comment everything they need to know about you.
  - foogazi 1y ago
    Why would I pay someone to screw me over ?
hearsathought 1y ago
> the Tesla EV fantasy is now a bust. Tesla is still one of a handful of trillion dollar companies. Maybe it will be a bust, but it isn't one today. > Uber P/E is about 20. Tesla P/E is around 170. So the expectation is tesla will continue to grow at a significant rate while uber "stagnates". > I personally don't think so. Investors do. I'm surprised how well the stock is doing given the all the distractions. It certainly isn't trading like it is about to bust.
reaperducer 1y ago
It's pretty safe to say that after a decade of unfulfilled projections and promises, the Tesla EV fantasy is now a bust. I guess historically, lots of companies have operated by selling dreams. The real estate industry sells dreams of suburban utopias. The fitness industry sells dreams of sexy good times. The cola industry sells dreams of likability and friendship. Apple sells dreams of in-crowd later-day eco-hipsterism. Tesla sells… dunno. Maybe dreams of billionaire crypto-bro futurism? As long as the company is worth $900B+, you're never going to convince its fans that they're wrong. Even if the stockholders all lost everything, I think a significant portion will still think they were following the messiah, the same way that old ladies give their last three pennies to tele-vangelists while eating cat food off of paper plates.
- jqpabc123 1y ago
  I guess historically, lots of companies have operated by selling dreams. Among it's peers, Tesla has no equal in the "dream" category. Tesla is one of the "Magnificent 7" technology stocks. Leaving Tesla aside, the average P/E of this group over the last 2 years is around 30. Tesla is currently around 170. But even this doesn't really capture the full extent of the Tesla "dream". Tesla is the only one of these stocks with an earnings decline over the past 2 years. The highest valuation combined with the poorest results --- that's a lot of dreaming.
leesec 1y ago
Not sure what you're talking about. Model Y was best selling car in the world last two years. That's a bust?
ryandvm 1y ago
Can we please stop calling it "robotaxi"? There's a fucking person being paid to sit in the car, who honestly has to be even more bored and awkward feeling than an uber driver. It's about as robotic as a carnival ride with some guy being paid to maybe press a red button. God, I would love to see an AMA from one of these guys that have to sit in a seat with their hands folded staring at the road 8 hours a day.
- leesec 1y ago
  You're skimming over the fact that the car is doing 99.999% of everything
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    Which means the safety driver is probably deeply bored and inattentive.
    - leesec 1y ago
      Sure, we'll see in the data soon enough how safe it is
      - jqpabc123 1y ago
        Or maybe not. Do you really trust a taxi service that opposes reporting accidents? https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/trump-transition-recommends-scrapping-car-crash-reporting-requirement-opposed-by-2024-12-13/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/trump-...
- jqpabc123 1y ago
  Can we please stop calling it "robotaxi"? Talk to Elon. He has "Robotaxi" painted on the side of his vehicles.
tim333 1y ago
Musk's new Tesla pitch is they are going to sell ten robots for every human. Just multiply some profit times 80bn robots and the stock is way underpriced! In some ways the Tesla EV fantasy has worked - build a high priced car to finance a medium priced car to finance cheap cars and move the world to sustainable transport. The only difference is the cheap cars are being made by Chinese manufacturers rather than Tesla. Which is actually in line with their thing on patents: > Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. (2014)

leoqa 1y ago

I have been paying about (premium lost from rolling puts) 1k/month for the last 4 months to short Tesla. I made about 12k on the last dip so I’m profitable but I’m just waiting for the bubble to burst. Today I doubled down when it went up, hoping to one day see it fail.

cbeach 1y ago
Whereas on the other hand I've gained handsomely from holding Tesla stock for many years, and plan to hold it for many more years. It feels good to support American-made sustainable technology that has revolutionised the electric car and battery storage markets. I struggle to understand those who would short-sell Tesla, unless they have some kind of emotional hangup against Elon Musk or government efficiency?
- Hamuko 1y ago
  What exactly have you gained from holding?
  - cbeach 1y ago
    I own stock that is worth many times what I paid for it, and any time I want to, I can exchange the stock for cash. Unless perhaps I missed something about how the stock market works?
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  > I struggle to understand those who would short-sell Tesla, unless they have some kind of emotional hangup against Elon Musk or government efficiency? It’s objectively clear that the company is in a bad market condition, and you don’t need to have an “emotional hangup against Elon Musk or government efficiency” to know it’s bad business to alienate your potential customer base and deliver shockingly bad public appearances. If Ford’s CEO was stumbling-down drunk or higher than a kite at a presser, I’d short Ford too.
  - cbeach 1y ago
    Musk was never a conventional squeeky-clean ultra-safe stage-managed CEO that speaks through a media team. That didn't stop him from raising the value of $TSLA from a penny stock to one of the largest companies in the world. With his initial investment, and with him as the product architect of the first Tesla vehicle (the Roadster), he transformed an academic project with no products to the world's most valuable automaker. An automaker so valuable, it's worth more than Toyota, BYD, GM, VW, BMW, Mercedes, Ford and Honda COMBINED. People have shorted $TSLA before because they underestimated Musk, and let their own personal affectations cloud their understanding of Tesla's potential, and Musk's singular genius.
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      > An automaker so valuable, it's worth more than Toyota, BYD, GM, VW, BMW, Mercedes, Ford and Honda COMBINED. This doesn't give you the slightest bit of pause?
      - TimorousBestie 1y ago
        It can’t; this is how meme stocks operate. If too many traders examine their motives and revert to trading rationally, the stock price corrects accordingly.
        robocat 1y ago
        > meme stock Poor explanation since ~50% stock is owned by institutions. I think retail holds 38% of ownership. Rest of ownership is mostly Elon ~13%. indexed fund ownership doesn't explain institutional holdings. Tesla is 5% of NASDAQ 100 by market cap. Vanguard owns 7.7%, BlackRock owns 6.4%. Disclaimer: not a financial analyst and I might have numbers wrong (mostly from Tiger Trading App).
- foogazi 1y ago
  > I struggle to understand those who would short-sell Tesla, unless they have some kind of emotional hangup against Elon Musk Wait, do you have an emotional hangup FOR Elon Musk ? > or government efficiency? Is this satire ?

Panzer04 1y ago

If robotaxis were commensurately cheap and available I'd happily dump my car. I don't see it happening for another decade or more, though.

water-data-dude 1y ago
I might do the same if they weren’t a privacy nightmare. The tech company running the robotaxi service would need to buck some Silicon Valley trends before I’d use their product
jqpabc123 1y ago
The robotaxi sales pitch is an inherent contradiction --- robo rides will be safe, readily available, cheap --- and wildly profitable. Maybe pick one or two of these at best but all of the above is highly unlikely. What makes this unlikely is simple marketplace competition. Just as unlikely as Tesla conquering the auto manufacturing market.

atonse 1y ago

> Half the world isn't going to ditch their autos in favor of robo rides any time soon. I don't know. Take cities like Bangalore (India) for example. I don't live there but do occasionally visit family every couple of years. And I consistently hear a general sentiment of "I just take Uber because the traffic is insane. But the traffic is insane because of too many Ubers" But in all of that sentiment, nobody's saying "I wish I could drive instead" – they're more than happy to have someone drive them around if it's cheap enough. That was true with Auto Rickshaws, and it's even more attractive in an air conditioned car. If taxis get cheaper, people will use them in even more situations, like daily commutes. Why not? And what do you mean by "EV Fantasy" – I get if you meant Robotaxi or self-driving fantasy. But there are hundreds of thousands of Teslas (maybe a million?) driving around the world isn't there? Are all these people imagining that they're driving a Tesla EV? Which part of it is a fantasy?

Spooky23 1y ago
The US isn't like that. The people with the money for the magic taxi are in the burbs. The fantasy that any of this nonsense is a sustainable business, especially when the charismatic leader completely FUBARed his government hobby project and is biting the hand that feeds him. Tesla's biggest source of revenue is the US government.
- popularonion 1y ago
  Suburbs and commuter towns desperately need Robotaxi - there’s literally no other option. Public transit isn’t coming, Waymo isn’t coming, Uber and Lyft are shrinking Even a US city of 100,000 people, it can be really tough or impossible to get an Uber - good luck getting a ride from the airport at 12:30 in the morning
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    If you can't afford a car, time to migrate. The economics of the magic robot taxi aren't going to save you.
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago

Hamuko 1y ago

Don't forget: they're also on the humanoid robot fantasy.

SilverBirch 1y ago

I'm not sure what you mean by Tesla's EV fantasy being a bust? In the last decade they've got from delivering 75k cars a year to delivering 1.8m cars a year. It's not a fantasy, it happened. Now, the stock price isn't based on the reality of the fundamental economics of a car company, but they didn't fail with EVs, they succeeded.

cbeach 1y ago
[flagged]
- justinrubek 1y ago
  Your theory is just not correct, particularly given that Biden and Harris are right-wing politicians.
  - omnimus 1y ago
    I guess (in US) left means left of Trump. Which Biden/Harris very slightly are.
- organsnyder 1y ago
  This isn't about ideology. It's about Musk behaving like a toddler. No way I'd make such a significant purchase from a company led by someone that volatile.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  > I blame the Left for being completely intolerant of anyone and any company that doesn't strictly adhere to their ideology. This is deeply, deeply silly to assert in 2025 as the right attempts to shut hobble the Ivy League, the NIH, prominent public policy law firms, green card holders writing op-eds, etc.
  - homefree 1y ago
    [flagged]

vel0city 1y ago

Robotaxi isn't even a new fantasy. In April 2019 Elon Musk said Model 3's would make their owners money participating in the autonomous ride-hailing fleet.

jqpabc123 1y ago
He forgot to mention one small little detail --- owners would have to ride along to supervise their "autonomous" vehicle. Otherwise, they will be sued for negligence when (not if) the "Full Self Driving" screws up.

thinkingtoilet 1y ago

The decline has nothing to do with projections and promises and everything to do with Elon alienating a huge part of potential customers. I was someone who went from wanting a Tesla to never buying one as long as Elon own a single share in the company.

cbeach 1y ago
[flagged]
- fires10 1y ago
  For some people it isn't 'just politics'. They feel threatened by potential loss of freedom and life. If it was just a disagreement on tax rates or some government spending it would be different. His views are against someone else's existence.
- justinrubek 1y ago
  Weird to see people downplay the significance of the degree of differing political opinions. This isn't a simple matter of disagreeing. I would be willing to bet that every single vehicle company CEO has drastically different takes on these things than I do. They stay out of the way, though.
- thinkingtoilet 1y ago
  1. Hondas are not inferior cars. 2. It's not about "different political opinions", it's far beyond that and to suggest so tells anyone reading your comment everything they need to know about you.
- foogazi 1y ago
  Why would I pay someone to screw me over ?

hearsathought 1y ago

> the Tesla EV fantasy is now a bust. Tesla is still one of a handful of trillion dollar companies. Maybe it will be a bust, but it isn't one today. > Uber P/E is about 20. Tesla P/E is around 170. So the expectation is tesla will continue to grow at a significant rate while uber "stagnates". > I personally don't think so. Investors do. I'm surprised how well the stock is doing given the all the distractions. It certainly isn't trading like it is about to bust.

reaperducer 1y ago

It's pretty safe to say that after a decade of unfulfilled projections and promises, the Tesla EV fantasy is now a bust. I guess historically, lots of companies have operated by selling dreams. The real estate industry sells dreams of suburban utopias. The fitness industry sells dreams of sexy good times. The cola industry sells dreams of likability and friendship. Apple sells dreams of in-crowd later-day eco-hipsterism. Tesla sells… dunno. Maybe dreams of billionaire crypto-bro futurism? As long as the company is worth $900B+, you're never going to convince its fans that they're wrong. Even if the stockholders all lost everything, I think a significant portion will still think they were following the messiah, the same way that old ladies give their last three pennies to tele-vangelists while eating cat food off of paper plates.

jqpabc123 1y ago
I guess historically, lots of companies have operated by selling dreams. Among it's peers, Tesla has no equal in the "dream" category. Tesla is one of the "Magnificent 7" technology stocks. Leaving Tesla aside, the average P/E of this group over the last 2 years is around 30. Tesla is currently around 170. But even this doesn't really capture the full extent of the Tesla "dream". Tesla is the only one of these stocks with an earnings decline over the past 2 years. The highest valuation combined with the poorest results --- that's a lot of dreaming.

leesec 1y ago

Not sure what you're talking about. Model Y was best selling car in the world last two years. That's a bust?

ryandvm 1y ago

Can we please stop calling it "robotaxi"? There's a fucking person being paid to sit in the car, who honestly has to be even more bored and awkward feeling than an uber driver. It's about as robotic as a carnival ride with some guy being paid to maybe press a red button. God, I would love to see an AMA from one of these guys that have to sit in a seat with their hands folded staring at the road 8 hours a day.

leesec 1y ago
You're skimming over the fact that the car is doing 99.999% of everything
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  Which means the safety driver is probably deeply bored and inattentive.
  - leesec 1y ago
    Sure, we'll see in the data soon enough how safe it is
    - jqpabc123 1y ago
      Or maybe not. Do you really trust a taxi service that opposes reporting accidents? https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/trump-transition-recommends-scrapping-car-crash-reporting-requirement-opposed-by-2024-12-13/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/trump-...
jqpabc123 1y ago
Can we please stop calling it "robotaxi"? Talk to Elon. He has "Robotaxi" painted on the side of his vehicles.

tim333 1y ago

Musk's new Tesla pitch is they are going to sell ten robots for every human. Just multiply some profit times 80bn robots and the stock is way underpriced! In some ways the Tesla EV fantasy has worked - build a high priced car to finance a medium priced car to finance cheap cars and move the world to sustainable transport. The only difference is the cheap cars are being made by Chinese manufacturers rather than Tesla. Which is actually in line with their thing on patents: > Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. (2014)