- I recently bought some TSLQ (2x short ETF) with a bit of play money after many years of being long on Tesla. I do think they're cooked at the current valuation and my thinking is pretty simple: almost the entirety of their valuation is predicated on near-instantaneous robotaxi rollout and a near monopoly on humanoids and neither of those are going to happen. None of the other businesses they've tried have worked and the car and storage businesses together are worth probably 15% of current valuation.
So first, why is robotaxi not happening? Well, it is just not on the scale they need it to. In addition to Waymo, many other companies are working on driverless systems and they're all making good progress. nVidia has a full stack competitors based on VLA models, as do Chinese manufacturers etc. In short, we'll see capable self driving systems from probably a dozen companies world wide. Tesla has some advantage here, but real world acceptance and scaling are slow, trust in Tesla is low and most of their cars are physically incapable of running the size of models L4 systems will require. My 2022 Model Y has roughly the same processing power as my Rovers Jetson Orin Nano and that thing isn't driving itself.
The humanoid part is even worse, Tesla has absolutely no structural advantages there - they're no better than Chinese companies at making the hardware and they're no better than the AI Labs at developing the models required. Also, again low trust. Tons of people will absolutely not let a tesla bot in their house. There's no reason to think they'll be wildly successful, and the actual capabilities and economic usefulness of humanoids are still some years away.
- Careful buying ETFs as a way to short the stock.
The ETFs are designed such that at any point in time, they are roughly 2x short the stock, but they do this by buying derivatives over time which means that the stock decreasing by X or increasing by Y doesn't mean you'll gain or lose 2X or 2Y over a long time period. If the stock increases first, then decreases, you'll probably lose money even if it ends up lower than when you bought it.
I think just shorting the stock or buying long dated put options is probably a better way to do it.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092815/risks...
This is not financial advice.
- Were the humanoid “robots” even real?
I saw some videos that seemingly showed them to just be remote controlled by a human, but I don’t research deeply enough on it to be confident that it was true.
- It's a mix, depending on what the task is, everything impressive is teleop. Which is fine in the abstract - all humanoids from all companies (there's probably like 3 dozen now) are either teleop, doing slow and cautious autonomy with limited scope or executing routines. This is simply how they must be developed - do some useful task with teleop and get data, train model, execute task unsupervised. It's all sensible except Tesla needs this to work at warp speed for their valuation to stay where it is, and it just won't. It's slow, expensive, and will take years to get that data flywheel spinning correctly, get people used to it etc. I just don't see it working on the timelines Tesla needs.
- Maybe Trump should make another TV appearance promoting Tesla.
- Yeah, but are they factoring in tesla bots replacing all manual labor in the next 5 years while everyone rides robotaxis everywhere? With AI? And a TeraFab? And 3D datacetenter mass drivers on orbiting satellites to mars?
Looks like classic manipulation so they can buy low before we hit $10T valuation
40 points by freediddy 2 hours ago | 7 comments