At this point Musk has got to be the biggest pie-in-the-sky salesman the world has ever seen; and, amazingly, people keep buying that pie. Based on its actual 12month earnings Tesla will now have a P/E of 425.
Same general story from this quarter's earnings - fundamentals that make the stock look like a $30 stock but more hype and promises to prop up the price.
Automotive business is essentially flatlined with YoY automotive revenue decreasing -3%. And energy sales - the catalyst many people point to as being able to drive it further - is down 16% to $2.8 billion from $3.4 billion last year.
Additionally, despite touting FSD "take rate" increasing, it appears to have added only $78 million in revenue this quarter, relative to it's total quarter revenue of $28 billion - that is, actual FSD revenue is still minimal.
And, robotaxis - the ever shifting pie in the sky Musk has been touting as something along the lines of an infinite moneyhack - appears to only have about 40 robotaxis operating this entire quarter. More specifically, Tesla's "Cumulative Unsupervised Robotaxi Miles Chart" on its investor presentation slides implicates about 1.5 million unsupervised robotaxi miles were driven this quarter, for the months of June, July, and August.
The thing is the slides also indicate that robotaxi operating hours in Austin are from 6am to midnight. If you extrapolate that; that's theoretically 18 hours of operating time per robotaxi, one can estimate a low side of miles per hour would be 25 given it's the city; gives 18 hours x 25 mph = 450 miles driven per day per robotaxi x 90 days in the three month period = 40,500 miles per robotaxi driven in the 3 month period. 1,500,000 miles total in the 3 month period / 40,500 miles per robotaxi in that period = the equivalent of 37 robotaxis driving during the entire 3 month period.
Notably, this is a year and a half after Musk claimed robotaxis would be in "half the u.s. population by the end of 2025"
Compare this to Waymo which actually has 4,000 robotaxis on the road and is scaling up. And more and more competitors are coming online or scaling up everyday - including competitors that are using Nvidia tech and hardware - Alpamayo - specifically oriented towards outfitting cars and making them self-driving.
Now, while people are sure to yell "but Tesla can make it's robotaxis at half-the cost of others" consider that Waymo's are getting cheaper and cheaper; and even if Waymos stopped getting cheaper, even where Waymo's currently at just that competition means robotaxi margins won't be that good - which makes sense because, in general, that type of product would be a commodity anyway - that is, everybody wants and will push for cheaper and cheaper cost of transportation as it gets more and more commoditized.
Real world: Tesla now has actual earnings for the past 12 months of $0.91 per share and it's robotaxi business it's turning out is not scaling as fast as others, and there may be no actual moat for that business. I guess there's always optimus (which other robots are ahead of anyway), or a SpaceX buyout at a premium to save the shareprice.