Whether that makes sense is pretty subjective. Personally I think they're overly optimistic and that's why I'm not a Tesla shareholder.
The whole market is totally insane at the market, inflated on promises not delivery. There's only one way it's going.
Those things do happen from time to time but especially when they become popular they create an opportunity for counter elites to disrupt you. Competent leaders seem to (I'd argue appropriately) consider these a liability more than an asset. I think the market is going to be neutral on them for that reason.
I also think conspiracies are much more rare than people like to think. A lot of them turn out to just be similar people thinking the same thing.
The military will pay him because there are no alternatives. So will many countries.
$TSLA isn’t a car company anymore, it’s $ELON and he’s trying to be a trillionaire and be more powerful than heads of state. Gilded age indeed.
Fun fact, John D. Rockefeller at his peak of wealth was equivilent to 3% of the GDP of the United States. That 3% figure right now would be $870B.
Obviously in the current environment it's not worth having the fight. Musk's brand implosion will be studied for decades as probably the biggest preventable destruction of shareholder value in history.
Nonetheless the cars remain great cars, even if it's no longer appropriate to say so. FWIW: used values have dropped too. If you don't want to line DOGE pockets or whatever, you can get a great deal on one from Carvana et. al.
But nonetheless they are and remain really great, frankly transformational vehicles and they remain easily accessible if you want to investigate for yourself.
What ultimately matters is the statistics, and while the statistics Tesla has released are not very convincing, we can at least be sure that supervised FSD is not dramatically more dangerous than human drivers. That would definitely have been obvious in the statistics by now.
It remains a mediocre car that was cool in 2017 when you could forgive the parts where it doesn’t deliver as promised because it was supposed to be revolutionary. But in 2025, a $50k car that promises 350 miles of range but can barely pull 200 can not be seriously called a great or revolutionary by any metric.
Now, he seems to be spending his days on ketamine fueled posting binges and fist fights in the white house instead of running Tesla and SpaceX.
If I was a tesla investor I would want out immediately.
Owing to the difference in sensor suite, I'm curious if Tesla FSD will be able to truly keep that same margin of safety, but I'm not super confident, and having to pause or rollback the trial would be a big hit in the underlying "value" of TSLA, I reckon.
I'll believe the self-driving taxi hype when I am every able to drive own to my place of brith. I am pretty confident that is not going to happen before I die.