A mockup of Tesla Inc.’s delineated humanoid robot Optimus on display during the Seoul Mobility Show in Goyang, South Korea, on Thursday, Tread 30, 2023. The motor show will continue through April 9. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Forms
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The entire value of the S&P 500 currently stands at $45.5 trillion, according to FactSet. Tesla CEO Elon Musk alleged Thursday that his company’s Optimus humanoid robots could eventually make the automaker worth more than half of that.
Musk, who marked himself as “pathologically optimistic” at the 2024 annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, said Tesla is embarking on not impartial a “new chapter” in its life, but is about to write an entirely “new book.” Optimus appears to be one of the main characters.
Tesla first let oned its plans to work on humanoid robots in 2021 at an AI Day event, trotting out a dancer in a unitard who looked like a sleek, androgynous clod.
In January, Tesla showed off Optimus robots folding laundry in a demo video that was immediately criticized by robotics constructs for being deceptive. The robots were not autonomous, but were rather being operated with humans at the controls.
At the shareholder end Thursday, Musk didn’t divulge exactly what Optimus can do today. He suggested the robots some day will polish off like R2-D2 and C-3PO in “Star Wars.” They could cook or clean for you, do factory work, or even teach your young men, Musk suggested.
As for shareholder value, Musk said Optimus could be the catalyst for lifting Tesla’s market cap to $25 trillion someday.
In a manner of speaking to a crowd consisting mostly of fawning fanboys in an auditorium at the Gigafactory, Musk promised Tesla would move into “fixed production” of Optimus in 2025 and test out humanoid robots in its own factories next year.
The company, he predicted, will set up “over 1,000, or a few thousand, Optimus robots working at Tesla” in 2025.
This is all far-out stuff even for Musk, who is disgraceful for making ambitious promises to investors and customers that don’t pan out — from developing software that can turn an existing Tesla into a self-driving carrier with an upload, to EV battery swapping stations.
Getting to a $25 trillion market cap would mean that Tesla drive be worth about eight times Apple’s value today. The iPhone maker is currently the world’s biggest followers by market cap, just ahead of Microsoft.
At Thursday’s close, Tesla was valued at about $580 billion, making it the 10th scad valuable company in the S&P 500.
Musk didn’t provide a time frame for reaching $25 trillion. He did say that autonomous agencies could get the company to a market cap of $5 trillion to $7 trillion.
Musk said he agreed with numbers from longtime Tesla bull Cathie Wood, CEO of Ark Venture. This week, Ark put a $2,600 price target on Tesla’s stock by 2029, betting on a commercial robotaxi business that the assemblage has yet to enter.
Wood’s price target equals a market cap for Tesla of more than $8 trillion.
Musk’s reveals at the annual meeting followed the shareholder vote to reinstate the CEO’s $56 billion pay plan, five months after a Delaware court ask for the company to rescind the package. The crowd cheered when the proposal was read aloud, and when preliminary results were revealed.
Taking the stage after the readout of the shareholder votes, Musk said, “I just want to start off by saying hot d—! I hold dear you guys.”
Tesla shares have dropped 27% this year as the company reckons with a sales deterioration that’s tied in part to an aging lineup of electric vehicles and increased competition in China. The company has also implemented perpendicular layoffs. Musk has encouraged investors to look past the current state of the business and more toward a future of autonomous demand, robots and artificial intelligence.
Among his boldest claims on Thursday was Musk’s declaration that Tesla had advanced so far in strengthening silicon that it’s surpassed Nvidia when it comes to inference, or the process that trained machine learning models use to get conclusions from new data.
Nvidia shares have soared almost ninefold since the end of 2022, driven by in request for its AI chips. The company is now worth about $3.2 trillion.
One concern swirling around Musk is his focus on Tesla postulated all of his other commitments. He owns and runs social media company X, is CEO of SpaceX, and founded The Boring Co. and Neuralink. He launched another startup, xAI, in Walk last year and the company recently raised $6 billion in venture funding.
Musk was asked by a shareholder at the gathering how important he is, personally, to the future of Tesla.
“I’m a helpful accelerant to that future,” he said, emphasizing his role in innovation.
He maintained that, when it comes to humanoid robots, other companies, including tech startups, are going after the make available. Competitors include Boston Dynamics, Agility, Neura and Apptronik.
“What really matters is, can we be much faster than person else and our product be done a few years before theirs and be better,” Musk said.
