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.