https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
Also worth noting that Elon said 2 weeks (!!!) ago on investors call that they expect to have Dojo operating sometime next year at scale equivalent to 100k h100... How people still don't see that this guy is just lying all the time is beyond me.
The ship is sinking very fast folks.
“And we’re pursuing the dual path of Nvidia and Dojo. But I would think of Dojo as a long shot. It’s a long shot worth taking because the payoff is potentially very high. But it’s not something that is a high probability. It’s not like a sure thing at all. It’s a high‑risk, high‑payoff program. Dojo is working, and it is doing training jobs, and we are scaling it up, and we have plans for Dojo 1.5, Dojo 2, Dojo 3, and whatnot. So I think it’s got potential, but I can’t emphasize enough: high risk, high payoff.”
https://thetranscript.net/transcript/5550/tesla-q4-2023-earn...
In other words, he admitted it’s a long shot to replace Nvidia with their own chip awhile ago. It’s interesting because Google hasn’t given up on their TPUs, but Elon being a hardware guy mostly, has.
The scale of Nvidia manufacturing and RnD should be staggering atm. Google built the entire software and hardware stack for TPUs before the AI boom. I can’t even imagine how hard it would be to hire GPU hardware talent right now.
It's also worth mentioning that having their own ambitious effort in secret development was a valuable BATNA (negotiating tactic) for long-term contracts with outside suppliers. The value of that recent >$16B deal with Samsung for AI chips thru 2033 may have benefited from the prospect of Dojo as a potential in-house alternative.
Tesla robotic future ? They are years behind competitors... they are very good at faking autonomous robots though - people are still falling for their Twitter posts, Robotaxi unveil with teleoperated robots and Tesla Diner teleoperated robot serving popcorn (which last something like 2 days... then it was gone already). It's all PR stuff, nothing is really happening behind the scenes.
Merging together the technological paths of autonomous behavior of a robot and all the little actuators, power supplies and sensors suites does not seem like a big leap either. Challenging but not fantasy.
Part of Elon's process is demonstrating the potential need / business case, while also testing implementation in real world, high stakes environments. A bartender/service roll is a fun place to test since they can deliver a service in a public setting, potentially tethered to the wall.
Yes it is fantasy. This is the same thing like showing a mockup and saying - okay, that's it, now we 'just' need to implement and make it work.
FSD as an ADAS system is fantastic. But it's nowhere near a fully autonomous driving.
As far as the ship sinking that's pretty silly. They continue to be profitable with some sectors like energy growing very quickly.
Virtually all EV makers have faced a couple of tough years. Many like Rivian and lucid are getting clobbered.
Tesla has a 37 billion dollar bank account and low debt. There is no scenario that the ship is sinking
It was clearly nowhere near where they said it was, or they would have some significant sunk costs and write downs. None of which exist in their financial statements for Dojo.
As for the ship sinking - I know it seems like a huge exaggeration now. But it's a car maker, with a collapsing sales and which made virtually all the profits from direct and indirect subsides - which just got axed too. That alone would be very worrying. But it's also a company which sold billions of $ of software that is still not working as advertised and lawsuit are only starting to come in. By their own admission the software won't work on >50% of cars they already sold and they would need to upgrade them 'sometime in the future'. Oh and the CEO is the most hated man in the US currently.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/tesla_inc_tsla_automotive_reg... https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/financials/
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/22/business/tesla-regulatory...
Overall, Tesla got >$10B of free profit from direct regulatory credit sales over its lifetime.
Indirect ones (7500$ subsides to car buyers) are going away end of September. While it's not a direct benefit to Tesla, it was a huge boost to sales and profits.
You said Tesla gets "Virtually all their profits" from regulatory credits. Tesla has made 45 billion in profit since 2021. Even if they took in 10 billion in regulatory credits that is less than 1/4th of their profit just since 2021. So not exactly a truthful statement when you say "Virtually all their profits"
I definitely think it will hurt US sales somewhat, however it's going to drive the other EV makers in the US into the tank. Most are still hemorrhaging money on their EV's. Tesla can just drop their production amount if sales fall off.
The US market is less than half their sales. We shall see.
The credits are drying up, the sales crashed, the brand is dead, and there's only so many mark-to-market accounting you can do on cryptocurrency.
If the stock wasn't buoyed by some bizarre modern financial techno cult, I'd short it
Energy continues to grow fast and there are a lot of exciting products in the pipeline
https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/06/22/ahead-of-dojo-tesla-revea...
I’m not into fucking society over like these sociopaths, I guess that’s “my problem”.