TSLA the stock would probably dip and then recover as investors realize Musk's whims would no longer influence the stock price.

Tesla the company would be fine, and I presume a giant merger would occur in the future.

Elon leaving would be good for the company fundamentally but it will be quickly revalued like a car company which will be disastrous for shareholders.

Tesla is more than a car company, selling solar, home batteries, and auto charging infrastructure. That said, every company at some point has to be valued intrinsically.

If you look at the financials, Tesla is pretty much only a car company.

By 2030, they will have $6-12B a year in revenue from their charging network.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/29/tesla-to-earn-billions-from-...

They are hitting over $1B a quarter in solar battery revenue, a business growing faster than their EV division

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-24/tesla-s-b...

EVs sales is still the lion's share of revenue, but any of these divisions could be a stand-alone business. (maybe not the solar panels, which hasn't done well at all)

I'm surprised anyone wants to argue about this.

"By 2030" is a long time away for a company that was close to bankruptcy about 6 years ago - anything can happen. Full-self driving is also 5 years away if you believe Musk - it's been 5 years away for the last 10 years, though. The first article you cited is basically quoting Tesla marketing material.

Here's the objective picture today (as of end of 2023): TSLA has $74.2 billion in revenue from being a car company. TLSA has $4.8 billion in revenue from energy production and storage. Gross profit is the same story for the two segments - $16 billion and $1 billion respectively. Margins are not dramatically different.

Tesla is a car company.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000162828024...

A hard to attain science and engineering task is often 5 years away for a long time until 5 years before it is actually delivered. Unlike building widgets building something never done before entails an awful lot of hard to estimate work. Anyone doing software engineering should be familiar with this.

The “5 years for 10 years” meme seems to be confusing a lack of accuracy when giving a precise answer to a difficult to estimate task for either foolishness or fraud, or perhaps both. To me it reads like every software and research estimate I’ve ever seen - a sliding estimate on something you know will deliver but hard to pin down exactly all the unknowables are worked out.

A more honest estimate is "we don't know how long it will take." Guessing that things are 5 years away is borderline fraud when you have no idea how long it will take (eg an uncertain, massive R&D project).

To be fair to you, it was actually "next year" for about 5 of the 10 years that Tesla was promising self-driving, which is a different story (likely actually fraud).

Did you check Tesla valuation to put up against those revenues ?

Even after the recent plunge (it's only a beginning) it's valued at $460B.

$6-12B of best case projected revenue, with low margins, by 2030 is meaningless for a company with this kind of valuation, to say it politely.

Tesla valuation was justified by a myriad of promises from Musk, and analysts that started to believe that sales of EVs will grow by 50% each year for the next 10 years.

Market cap isn't the same thing as revenue. Their annual car revenue is somewhere in the neighborhood of $100B a year, which still is the lion's share, but anything that generates 5-10% of revenue isn't something to ignore, especially when you have a couple of those. Apple's Mac sales are only 15% of their iPhone revenues, for example.

I'm not a fan of musk, but I think the fundamentals have turned on Tesla. Cheaper chinese EVs are coming out in two of the biggest 3 markets and traditional auto makers are catching up in the US. A replacement level CEO would probably be making similar decisions.

> Cheaper chinese EVs are coming out in two of the biggest 3 markets

I expect this to be ephemeral due to geopolitics and the local politics. Chinese domestic consumption is lackluster compared to their production and they are “product dumping” on the rest of the world that have domestic manufacturing and varying levels of preexisting market protectionism. That and China’s belligerent geopolitical alliance increasingly clashing with the West and in their regions means that stiff(er) tariffs are imminent.

Outside of maybe the UK, I don't think Europe is nearly as dead set on the adversarial relationship with China and you can't buy retail Chinese EVs right now in the US.

The demand reduction is also a problem for Tesla.

But one thing Chinese EV companies have is existing products in the lowest market segments. Tesla is giving up on a car cheaper than the 3 and I don't think that's a particularly unique Musk decision. American public companies are allergic to low margin products.

> I don't think Europe is nearly as dead set on the adversarial relationship with China

Market protectionism is sufficient to provide pushback on Chinese product dumping in Europe in the medium term. However, as the global order deteriorates and countries have to pick sides most of the EU is unlikely to choose to align with a Russian ally.

They've been extremely selective in their targeting of Chinese firms accused of selling weapons to Russia. And last year Macron directly said europe has no interest in backing the US's position on Taiwan. I think as the global situation deteriorates, they are likely to want to focus on situations closer to the continent. I haven't heard if they are planning on stopping BYD from opening a factory in Hungary.

> stopping BYD from opening a factory in Hungary

Opening a factory is a different matter. If the factory contains significant capital (ie isn’t just glorified assembly) then much of the manufacturing capacity is domestic as is the labor which is a method of avoiding tariffs that host countries tend to favor. The calculus is different at that point and could only affect the imported parts or raw materials if applicable. In a pinch such manufacturing can be nationalized and repurposed.

>> I don't think Europe is nearly as dead set on the adversarial relationship with China

They will be “persuaded” with sanctions. Europe is not really a sovereign entity.

The US is only really deploying broad sanctions on technology that might have applications in military and security competition. And sanctions are proving hard to really enforce if the entities involved never use dollars.

EU defense and government contractors might not have a lot of agency, but plenty of other businesses do depending on the country.

Most countries don’t have enough domestic auto production to care enough not to buy cheap Chinese EVs. Most people don’t think about politics when they can buy a nice car for $20k.

> Most countries don’t have enough domestic auto production to care

Countries without domestic production are also not major consumer markets, and when aggregated into major trading blocks like the EU their most influential member states do have domestic production and a strong protectionist bent so I expect they’ll also be strong armed into a protectionist umbrella. It also makes sense for Europe as a whole to not have its domestic production product dumped into oblivion as globalization crumbles.

That really isn’t true. Australia is a major consumer market, SEA has money to buy things even if they don’t make many cars outside of maybe Thailand. Ceding the car markets of just the non major countries is enough to create huge waves in the industry. The EU and the USA can lockdown its market with Japan, but that’s about it.

> Australia is a major consumer market

Australia is more than nothing, but a country with 26 million people and about 1.2 million new car sales annually isn’t tipping the scales of the global market too much. They’re also geopolitically aligned with the USA so the medium to long term outlook is negative for China trade relations.

> SEA has money to buy things even if they don’t make many cars outside of maybe Thailand

Every region has money to buy things and their business isn’t worthless, but SEA isn’t a big consumer market yet and isn’t going to be making up for the loss of/reductions in the big consumer markets. There’s only so many sales that the region can absorb even if we don’t factor in the fact that the region is adjacent to and frequently the target of Chinese military belligerence recently and for centuries. There is increasing regional geopolitical alignment with the USA albeit at arms length.

We definitely aren’t making enemies in SEA, but we are not close enough friends yet that they are willing to take a hit on getting cheap cars from China. Australia also, they are basically the only country that will follow us anywhere to war (eg Vietnam), but even they will buy BYD over Ford if the price is right.

"I kinda wonder what will happen to TSLA if Musk were to just _walk away"

Merge with Toyota, sort out reparability issues, slap ten year warranty on cars and put up prices 15%. Dominate the profitable middle of the market as production costs fall and mint money while everyone else is left scrabbling at the bottom of the market.

First of all, he’s not going to walk away. He can’t. He knows if he does the stock price will drop and his net worth will drop and given his mess in Twitter/X it’ll further screw’s him up. His entire thing about this is so that he can maintain his richest person in the world status, nothing more.

So, no, he’s not really walking away.

But, even if he does, depending on who they get, it might be a net positive for Tesla in the long run.

He can't just walk away.

He better be driving that cyber truck with 3000 dollars cyber tent professionally installed at full speed while leaving the company.

Makes room for JB Straubel to return. Roll Tesla up with Redwood Materials and keep scaling up with an adult having both technical acumen and empathy in charge.

I think they'd be better for it at this point.

  1. Musk has destroyed the brand for many of their potential customers (who tend to be "liberal")
  2. He no longer will force the company to pursue foolish distractions like the CyberTruck.

Do you invest your life’s savings every time you believe a certain security will increase in value?

No. I’m more aware of my own cognitive biases. “Smart people full of doubt” and all that.

Are you implying that others commenting here are unaware of their cognitive biases? What leads you to believe that?

Their unwavering belief that Musk’s shitposting on Twitter will somehow affect anything IRL outside the increasingly insular US based neoliberal bubble.

If I knew when Musk was going to announce he's immediately leaving TSLA, I would. Stock would pop 100% within seconds. But that would be insider trading.

Musk has done well with Tesla historically. But by dropping the plans for the low cost Tesla and pushing the Cybertruck, and focusing most of his time on Twitter, it doesn’t seem wrong that people are suggesting Tesla would be better without him. The stock is below its 1 Year low and if the losses keep up at the same rate they have for the next 2-3 weeks, and it seems like they will given the dismal earnings call and consistent bad news coming out, such as the physical recall of all Cybertrucks, the stock is likely to trend down to at least its three year low.

If you’re comparing Jobs in 2005 to Musk now, you’re saying the Cybertruck is Musk’s iPhone. The thing looks cool (I think, very subjectively), but has been a pretty big failure.

I’d be selling GM and Ford stock then. Cause Tesla would crush them without the distraction of Musk

I think, at a $55B price tag, yes, it would be a net positive for shareholders.

I think the other question is how likely he would be to walk away. I think at $0, Musk would likely stick it out at Tesla, since so much of his net worth, ego, identity, and brand is locked up in there. In other words, this seems like a bluff.

He has twit x and space x. That should be enough for his identity. And he wouldn’t be forced to sell his Tesla holdings. He’s been threatening to take his bat and ball and go home for a while. I’m curious how it would go.

It could actually be good for Tesla to be freed from his whimsical decrees (a friend of mine works there and his mercurial nature gives the company whiplash) and it could be good for him to think he has to start something new. He seems to think he can do a lot of good ai work. Maybe he can.

Good point.

If history is any indicator, he seems strongest at mid-stage companies. He didn't start Tesla. He isn't doing well there right now (or Twitter, for that matter). He's too erratic for a mature company.

But he did an awesome job taking Tesla from the $M to the $B stage.

Any company at that stage would also benefit from the visibility he brings. For smaller players, any press is good press.

Musk is the soul of Tesla for better or worse. Tesla currently has a market cap 10x greater than Ford ... if Musk leaves, sanity returns and Tesla would drop dramatically.

Good?