Tesla sales fall for the second year in a row
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
On the Optimus front, I spent years in manufacturing. This industry is conservative and deeply relationship driven. Plants prioritize uptime and proven reliability, and they're slow to adopt newcomers. ABB is the 800-pound gorilla here - just as they have been in the PLC space for decades. ABB's long-standing relationships and deep integration support make it incredibly hard for newcomers to gain traction. I should know - I worked for one of their competitors!
Bottom line: Tesla's strategy hinges on two moonshots in industries where incumbents are entrenched and adoption cycles are slow. If these bets don't pay off, Tesla needs a fallback - energy storage, grid solutions, or advanced EV platforms - before the narrative collapses. They'd be wise to leverage their EV business to launch these initiatives, but waning consumer confidence and declining sales make that increasingly difficult.
Robotaxis/cybercabs or whatever are not currently self driving. They’re Level 3, given the requirement for human monitors. To my knowledge, they’re doing fine safetywise as Level 3 systems.
Good news! No matter what Tesla does, Musk's orbiters will tell you that Tesla isn't a <thing they currently do> company, it's actually a bet on <future, tangentially-related thing>.
It takes a lot of hubris to throw away ostensibly worldwide EV dominance. And selling Americans on giving up car/independence culture when compared with Europe or Asia will be tough.
They will undoubtedly crush in the robot and energy space though.
This was never a possibility to begin with and only Musk cultists thought it was.
Citation needed
>Last month, Tesla confirmed the fleet had traveled roughly 250,000 miles. With 7 reported crashes at the time, Tesla’s Robotaxi was crashing roughly once every 40,000 miles (extrapolating from the previously disclosed Robotaxi mileage).
>For comparison, the average human driver in the US crashes about once every 500,000 miles.
Robotaxi: Tesla's autonomously driven ride hailing service. Currently using Model Y's or whatever, maybe using Cybercabs once those actually exist, maybe eventually also leveraging Tesla vehicles owned by others (lmao no one who has though that through for more than a minute or two actually wants to risk their vehicle like that)
Cybercab: A Tesla vehicle explicitly built for the Robotaxi service, containing no driver controls whatsoever because they're expected to operate without any (local) human oversight
Afraid? Are you somehow invested in Tesla?
If Waymo or BYD (or Mercedes or GM, lol) get to Level 5 before 2030, and Tesla is still struggling with Level 4, the door shuts. Cameras-only autonomy starts getting banned. (We may see it sooner in e.g. China, India, the EU, and New York and California as a result of Trump-Musk politics.)
That said, it’s a Musk company, so downside is capped. If it fell below $100 to 500bn, xAI or SpaceX will buy it.
This is false. SpaceX is cash flow positive.
This is false.
> Depending on how you price internal transactions for manufacturing and launching Starlink satellites you can fudge the hell out of the term "cash flow positive.”
This is nonsense. In accrual accounting, yes, there is room for fuckery. In cash accounting, you can shift cash around within the system, but the system is cash constrained.
SpaceX is cash-flow positive.
> SpaceX continued to take outside investments in 2025
Sure. It raised in its Series J. It has bought back more than that total round, secondary included, in stock.
It will probably raise massive amounts in 2026. It’s making large capital investments.
But for a few years, it didn’t. It was largely coasting. And in those years, up to now, it’s been cash-flow positive. It could have paid a dividend if it wanted.
So SpaceX would be worth 27x just from payload even if the profit margin was the same, even if they weren't the cheapest launch vehicle and therefore a natural provider for all the mega-constellations that want to compete with Starlink in coming years, and even if they didn't have this plausible (allbeit definitely work-in-progress) vision for their even better margin space truck that is Starship + Superheavy?
All Musk's valuations are based on his visions for what could be. It's just that for SpaceX, unlike for X and Tesla, "what could be" still seems plausible.
For Tesla… there is the argument that while "what could be" is very unlikely, if he pulls it off then it is also very valuable. But I not only don't think he can pull it off at all, even if he could don't think he will have market dominance sufficient to justify the price.
SpaceX… may have similar risks, depending IMO more on Chinese companies thinking "Great idea, let's do that but better" than e.g. European companies doing that. But even with that, 27x for current launches, and an additional 3x combined with that for other constellations plausibly gets them to around x80 even if Starship continues to not be reusable.
Starship is a big question mark for me. Assume it works: Would it be cheap enough to induce demand? Dunno. Not implausible, but I really don't know, and that is needed to get up to 700x.
More to the point: valuation is relatively independent of whether a business is cash-flow positive. (Totally independent in the case of practically-unlevered companies like SpaceX.)
- https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/02/tesla-tsla-q4-2025-vehicle-d...
Bullish :-)
Will probably +3% tomorrow.
Did they pander disrespectfully and partisanly?
Is that selling electric cars to Republicans?
Did they build a "cyber" puss-APC product for the wider market and then piss it away on the largest steel stamping machine in Texas, nay the world (which is a single point of failure for production and maintenance)?
Someone should explain to them that there are less hazardous batteries than Lithium Ion.
It's like there's a freeloading pandering narcissist who's assumed Elon's identity (because they were such a risk to other operations where there is not such accountability to a board and to the people).