After Elon Musk won support from Tesla shareholders to pay out a $56 billion compensatory bonus and move the company’s headquarters to Texas, the billionaire announced his next ambitious goal: to turn the $25 trillion electric car company around.
Key Facts
- The entire value of the S&P 500 currently stands at $45.5 trillion, according to FactSet. Tesla’s CEO said his company’s Optimus humanoid robots could eventually make the automaker worth more than half that amount.
- Musk, who characterized himself as a “pathological optimist” at the 2024 annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, said Tesla was embarking not only on a “new chapter” in its life, but was about to write an entirely “new book”. Optimus seems to be one of the main characters.
- Tesla first revealed its plans to work on humanoid robots in 2021 at an AI Day event, unveiling a dancer in a jumpsuit that looked like a sleek, androgynous robot.
- In January, Tesla showed off Optimus robots folding laundry in a demo video that was immediately criticized by robotics engineers as a hoax. The robots were not autonomous but rather operated with humans at the controls.
What To Watch For
At Thursday’s shareholder event, Musk didn’t reveal exactly what Optimus might do today. He speculated that the robots would one day act like R2-D2 and C-3PO from the Star Wars movie. They could cook or clean for you, work in a factory or even teach your children, Musk suggested.
Follow THE FUTURE on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X and Telegram
As for shareholder value, Musk said Optimus could be the catalyst to lift Tesla’s market capitalization to $25 trillion someday.
Speaking to a crowd of mostly adoring fans in an auditorium at the Gigafactory, Musk promised that Tesla would move to “limited production” of the Optimus in 2025 and test humanoid robots in its factories next year.
The company, he predicts, will have “over 1,000 or several thousand Optimus robots running Tesla” by 2025. All of these are far-fetched even for Musk, who is known for making ambitious promises to investors and customers that don’t come true, from developing software that can turn an existing Tesla into a self-driving, drop-in vehicle, to battery-swapping EV stations.
Big Number
Reaching a market cap of $25 trillion would mean Tesla would be worth about eight times Apple. The iPhone maker is currently the world’s largest company by market capitalization, just ahead of Microsoft. At Thursday’s close, Tesla was valued at about $580 billion, making it the 10th most valuable company in the S&P 500. Musk did not provide a time frame for reaching $25 trillion. He said autonomous vehicles could propel the company to a market capitalization of $5 trillion to $7 trillion.
A Look Into The Future
Tesla shares have fallen 27% this year as the company expects sales to decline, linked in part to an aging lineup of electric vehicles and increased competition in China. The company has also implemented drastic layoffs. Musk encouraged investors to look beyond the current state of the business and more toward the future of autonomous driving, robots and artificial intelligence.
Taking the stage after the shareholder votes were read, Musk said, “I just want to start by saying I love you guys.”
Among his boldest claims on Thursday was Musk’s declaration that Tesla has advanced so far in silicon development that it has surpassed Nvidia when it comes to the interface, or process, that trained machine learning models use to make inferences from new data.
Nvidia shares have jumped nearly ninefold since the end of 2022, driven by demand for its AI chips. The company is now worth about $3.2 trillion.
One concern swirling around Musk is his focus on Tesla given all his other commitments. He owns and operates social media company X, is the CEO of SpaceX and the founder of The Boring Co. and Neuralink. He launched another startup, xAI, in March of last year, and the company recently raised $6 billion in venture funding.
Musk was asked by a shareholder at the meeting how important he personally is to Tesla’s future.
“I’m a useful accelerator of that future,” he said, emphasizing his role in innovation.
He said that when it comes to humanoid robots, other companies, including tech startups, are chasing the market. Competitors include Boston Dynamics, Agility, Neura and Apptronik.
“What really matters is whether we can be much faster than everybody else and have our product ready a few years before theirs and be better,” Musk said.
