Right now, the S&P 500 is worth a total of $45.5 trillion. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, said Thursday that his company’s Optimus robotic robots could make the car company worth more than half of that amount in the future.
Musk called himself “pathologically optimistic” at the annual meeting of Tesla shareholders in Austin, Texas, in 2024. He said that Tesla is about to start not just a “new chapter” in its life, but a whole “new book.” It looks like Optimus is one of the main figures.
Tesla first talked about its plans to make humanoid robots at an AI Day event in 2021, where they showed off a dancer in a unitard who looked like a sleek, effeminate robot.
When Tesla showed off Optimus robots folding laundry in a demo video in January, robotics experts said it was dishonest and called it off right away. To be clear, the robots were not working on their own; people were controlling them.
Musk didn’t say exactly what Optimus can do today at the event for shareholders on Thursday. He said that the robots might one day do things like R2-D2 and C-3PO did in “Star Wars.” Musk said that they could cook or clean for you, work in a business, or even teach your kids.
Musk said that Optimus could help bring Tesla’s market value up to $25 trillion one day, which would be good for shareholders.
Musk told a crowd at the Gigafactory that Tesla would start “limited production” of Optimus in 2025 and test out humanoid robots in its own plants the following year. The crowd was mostly adoring Musk fans.
“Over 1,000, or a few thousand, Optimus robots working at Tesla” he said the company would have in 2025.
Even Musk thinks this is a long way off. He is known for making big claims to investors and customers that don’t come true, like making software that can upload to an existing Tesla and turn it into a self-driving car, or setting up charging stations for electric vehicles.
If Tesla’s market value reached $25 trillion, it would be worth eight times as much as Apple is now. The company that makes iPhones is currently the biggest in the world by market value, just ahead of Microsoft.
Tesla was worth about $580 billion at the end of the day on Thursday, which made it the 10th most valuable company in the S&P 500.
Musk didn’t say when they would hit $25 trillion. He did say that self-driving cars could raise the value of the company to $5 trillion to $7 trillion.
Musk stated that he agreed with the numbers given by Cathie Wood, CEO of Ark Invest, who has long been a Tesla fan. Ark set a price goal of $2,600 for Tesla’s stock by 2029 this week, betting that the company will use robot taxis for business, which it hasn’t done yet.
This means that Wood thinks Tesla’s market value will be more than $8 trillion.
Musk’s words at the annual meeting came after shareholders voted to bring back the CEO’s $56 billion pay plan, even though a Delaware court had told the company to cancel the package five months before. The crowd cheered when the proposal was read out loud and when the first findings were shown.
Taking the stage after the results of the vote were read, Musk said, “First, I want to say hot d—! “I love you all.”
This year, Tesla shares have dropped 27% as the company deals with a drop in sales caused in part by an older line of electric cars and more competition in China. The company has also fired a lot of people. Musk has told investors to forget about how the business is doing right now and focus on the future, which will include self-driving cars, robots, and AI.
Musk made one of the boldest claims on Thursday when he said that Tesla had made so much progress in making silicon that it had surpassed Nvidia in inference, which is the process that learned machine learning models use to figure out what new data means.
Shares of Nvidia have gone up almost nine times since the end of 2022. This is because people want its AI chips so much. There is now about $3.2 trillion worth of the company.
Musk has a lot of responsibilities, and some people are worried about how much time he spends on Tesla. He started The Boring Co. and Neuralink and owns and runs the social media business X. He is also the CEO of SpaceX. In March of last year, he started a new business called xAI. The company just recently raised $6 billion in venture capital.
One of the shareholders asked Musk at the meeting how important he thinks he is to the future of Tesla as a person.
In order to stress his part in innovation, he said, “I’m a helpful accelerator to that future.”
And when it comes to lifelike robots, he said that the market is being taken by other companies, even tech startups. Companies like Boston Dynamics, Agility, Neura, and Apptronik are competitors.
“What really matters is, can we be much faster than everyone else and our product be done a few years before theirs and be better,” he said.
Source: cnbc.com
