I respectfully disagree.

1) The denominator and numerator need to match up.

$40B is the total costs assuming self-driving had 100% market penetration and were self-driving 100% of the time. It's not an estimate for damages this year.

If you look at a snapshot today, Autopilot is responsible for O(300) accidents per year, leading to around $300M in potential damages. That's about 1% of their profit, and 0.25% of their revenue.

2) Market cap is quite literally a bank. I can always borrow from the market by releasing more shares, or do the reverse by buying them back.

> 2) Market cap is quite literally a bank. I can always borrow from the market by releasing more shares, or do the reverse by buying them back.

Here's an idea. Become the CEO of a large cap company and try that. If you are please let us know which one, I'd love to short your stock just before you do that because I would make a literal killing.

The moment you do that your stock will tank a significantly larger amount than what you just diluted, also you would be fired by your board the very next day.

Modern stock prices are not anywhere near book value of the company, the is especially true for Tesla which by many people's estimation is quite overvalued and a move like that would just tank the stock.

You are talking out your ass.

Furthermore, spending 2x of its profit on liability payouts would lower is present and projected profit, resulting in a much lower market cap.

No one is proposing Tesla be liable for every accident on the road.... At the time they have 100% market penetration, their market cap will be much higher.

Nevertheless, it's not clear the impact on Tesla's market cap. If a self-driving car costs $1000 more, and saves me $1000 on insurance, on the net, it's a wash for the buyer. Tesla can quite literally pass on the costs to the buyer in the purchase price, who can get it back in insurance premiums.

Personally, it'd be an upside to me. My costs would be the same, but my stress, risk, liability, etc. would go down. I don't want to kill someone, and if I do cause an accident, I don't want the headache. If other people are like me, sales (and market cap) might go up.

I'm rather tired of making the argument that market cap != Cash, thank you.

The easiest would be to compare this to giving fines based on net worth.

If you own a home and car your net worth could be in the range of 100-200k dollars.

You happy to receive a fine of 10k dollars? That surely is nothing for you, I mean its 5-10% of your net worth.

I'd argue for a lot of people even a fine of 1k dollars would put them back quite a bit.