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Musk With A Huge New Goal – To Turn Tesla Into A $25 Trillion Company

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.

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.

Europe’s Deadly Summer Heat Exposed The Cost Of A Warming Continent

Europe experienced its deadliest summer for heat-related deaths on record in 2026, with an estimated 24,400 excess deaths linked to extreme temperatures across 30 countries. Researchers estimate that human-induced climate change was responsible for around 32,000 of the deaths attributed to heat in the study’s broader analysis, accounting for 65% of the total.

The findings highlight the growing public-health consequences of global warming, largely driven by fossil fuel use, as extreme heat becomes more frequent and severe.

A Summer Of Dangerous Heat

Between June and August, heatwaves pushed temperatures in Western Europe to an average of 2.9°C above the 1991–2020 norm, with some days reaching 12°C above average. Nearly a third of estimated heat-related deaths occurred during a particularly intense heatwave between 17 June and 1 July.

“These numbers are a stark reminder that our hotter, more extreme summers are having an increasingly severe impact on public health,” said Dr Clair Barnes, a researcher at Imperial College London and co-author of the study.

The estimated toll exceeded previous peaks of around 29,000 deaths in summer 2022 and 28,000 in 2003 across the region studied.

How Researchers Estimated The Toll

Researchers modelled the relationship between temperature and mortality across 854 urban areas in the EU, UK, Norway and Switzerland, covering around 40% of the population in the 30 countries studied.

The analysis incorporated temperature records, age, socioeconomic conditions, environmental factors and access to healthcare. By comparing actual temperatures with those expected without human-induced warming, the team estimated the additional deaths attributable to climate change.

Final official mortality figures for summer 2026 are not yet available in many countries, and heat-related deaths are often underreported because their effects can be difficult to identify directly.

Older People Face The Greatest Risk

People aged 85 and over accounted for roughly half of the estimated deaths. However, the impact extended across age groups, with around 800 excess deaths among adults aged 20–44 and approximately 6,000 among people under 65.

Southern Europe experienced the highest mortality burden, reflecting hotter temperatures and other vulnerabilities, including air pollution, limited green space and unequal access to healthcare and heat-alert systems.

Italy, France And Spain Record Highest Toll

Italy recorded an estimated 13,303 heat-related excess deaths, followed by France with 7,268 and Spain with 6,824. Germany recorded around 6,340, while the UK saw an estimated 4,354 deaths.

In the UK, the heat also placed significant pressure on healthcare services. Andrew Hartle, Professor of Practice of Anaesthesia at Imperial College Healthcare, said demand during the summer resembled that of a severe winter virus season.

Cities Urged To Strengthen Heat Protection

Researchers say cities can reduce the risks through climate shelters, external shading and building retrofits, alongside measures to help residents avoid exposure during the hottest hours. Checking on vulnerable people, staying hydrated and following heat alerts are also important.

The researchers stress that adaptation must go hand in hand with reducing fossil fuel use to limit further warming. The findings underline that extreme heat is already a major public-health threat across Europe, with thousands of lives at risk each summer.

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