The outro from a May 22 post:
....As Intel's Andy Grove famously said:
“Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction.Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure.Only the paranoid survive.”Mr. Musk has his blind spots but China sneaking up on Tesla probably isn't one of them. He knows that Western companies will eventually lose the battle for electric vehicle dominance and something that he saw sometime in the last couple years seems to have scared him into action on the fronts where Tesla has a competitive advantage: access to some truly brilliant people; artificial intelligence facilitated by a long history with Nvidia and autonomous vehicles.
So again, we wish him luck, and think he'll succeed but this stuff is serious business.
Outro now intro! Here at Climateer Investing we recycle! (and still don't know what Elon sees that spooked him.)
From the Boston Herald, June 16:
Elon Musk responded in kind to Tesla Inc. investors reapproving his massive compensation plan, offering outlandish predictions that he can enrich shareholders all over again.
After Tesla’s general counsel confirmed Thursday that investors supported awarding stock options to Musk worth as much as $55.8 billion, the chief executive officer said the company’s robot-making effort may one day dwarf its car business.
Tesla has all of two humanoid robot prototypes plucking battery cells off the end of a production line in California and placing them in shipping containers. “Quite a few” others are cruising around the company’s offices in Palo Alto, Musk said during the company’s annual meeting.
The CEO isn’t expecting the bot — called Optimus — to go into limited production until next year, when Tesla could put a few thousand to the test in its own factories. He nevertheless offered a pie-in-the-sky projection that Tesla may one day make around $1 trillion of profit annually from the product, without offering a time frame.
“If the price-to-earnings multiple is, say, I don’t know, 20 or 25, something like that, that would mean a $20 trillion market cap from Optimus alone,” Musk said. “It’s within the realm of possibility for Tesla to achieve a valuation 10-times that of the most valuable company today.”
Work on robots was at the center of an ultimatum Musk laid down earlier this year. The CEO openly pressured Tesla’s board to boost his stake in the company to around 25%, saying that he otherwise preferred to build artificial intelligence and robotics products elsewhere....
....MUCH MORE
