00:00 Speaker A
No company on Earth has as much key man risk as as Tesla does, right? To believe in Tesla’s current valuation, you have to attribute some enormous amount to Elon Musk magic. You just do, right? I mean, the theory is that somehow self-driving cars are going to generate the returns they have, but they’re not the leader in that technology or autonomous robots are going to do it, but they’re not the leader in that technology either. So there has to be some theory by which Elon Musk can do that. And look, after SpaceX, who’s going to say that’s impossible? But if Elon Musk isn’t involved in Tesla, then your value, the value you’re attributing to Elon Musk magic has to get much higher because now you’re saying it’s like 20% of Elon is going to deliver that. You’re stretching the credulity of that story further and further with every beat. And then adding to that, of course, the fact that the other adventure, his other adventures aren’t the sort of things that give you confidence in what we’re doing at Tesla. If Tesla’s valuation is driven by, you know, its ability to do autonomous cars, which is driven by its mastery of AI technologies, and Grock is currently declaring itself to be Mecca Hitler. Well, then you got to wonder about the mastery of AI technologies part.
03:33 Speaker B
Go to final question. What if you’re a Tesla investor and you think to yourself, you know what? Maybe I just look through this drama. I look through the deadlines. I look through the posts on X. When it comes to Tesla, I just stay focused on really what matters now, which is the cars. The EVs are still what drives the P&L and the Q2 deliveries. Hey, they were better than what some feared on the streets, why the stock popped when we got that number. And I’ll just stay focused on that. I’ll stay focused on the EVs and the fundamentals. I’ll ignore what I see on X. What would you say to that investor?
04:51 Speaker A
I mean, if you’re a Tesla investor, you have already made the decision to ignore all of this, right? It’s not like Elon doing things that no one else in the world would do is happened last week. We have years of this. So you have already made that choice. And what I would say is, if if you’re just focused on the cars, what’s your theory behind by which Tesla is going to maintain or increase its dominance of the electric car market when rivals are coming in who are producing cars as good or better as anything Tesla can do. If you’ve got a theory for that, that says exactly how they’re going to do that, first, you should share that with Tesla because I’m sure they’d like to know what it is. And second, then you should buy it because okay, then it makes sense. But I haven’t heard anyone propose a plausible version of that story yet.
