What is Tesla? Whatever suits Elon Musk at any given moment

Michael Burry, the fund manager on whom the film The Big Short (2015) was based and who became famous (and wealthy) for anticipating the subprime mortgage crisis, published on his blog in December 2025 his conviction that Tesla, Elon Musk’s electric vehicle and energy company, had been “ridiculously overvalued for a long time.” In his view, the company’s value to investors was only being diluted over time, in part by the exorbitant compensation paid to Musk, which does not match Tesla’s actual profits. Tesla’s stock has risen 115% over the past five years despite never having paid a dividend since its debut on the market a decade ago. Nearly six months have passed, but Burry’s thesis remains intact. In recent remarks he echoed a market rumor that Musk would use SpaceX’s initial public offering to merge it with Tesla, which would further dilute the value of a company that is currently the ninth-largest in the world by market capitalization ($1.64 trillion).

David Trainer, chief executive of financial research firm New Constructs, shares the same diagnosis. In a post on the Trainer in New Constructs newsletter he wrote: “Whether you think Tesla is just a car company, or a combination of robot, solar, battery, insurance, FSD, space exploration, and satellite companies, its stock is terribly overpriced.” According to Trainer’s analysis, “Tesla’s current stock price implies that the company will become the world’s largest automaker, not just electric vehicle (EV) maker, even as the company is losing market share, seeing revenues flatten, and continually misses its delivery goals.” For the analyst, Tesla’s shares should be worth no more than $50 when they currently trade at $424.

In 2025 the company recorded its second consecutive year of falling sales. Total revenue last fiscal year was $94.827 billion ($69.526 billion from vehicle sales), down 3%, and profit ($3.794 billion) was 46% lower. In the first quarter of 2026 sales recovered with a 6% improvement, although vehicle deliveries fell short of investor expectations — about 365,000 deliveries were expected, and only 358,023 were made.

One weakness analysts covering the company highlight is that Tesla has gone three years without launching new models. And the last one it put on sale, the angular, sharp-edged Cybertruck — a personal bet by Musk — does not meet road regulations in several parts of the world, including Europe, and inventories are piling up. That is despite maneuvers by the world’s richest person to move them off the lots. Musk’s influence on the Trump administration has resulted in the State Department spending $400 million on these vehicles. In addition, SpaceX bought 17% of the production of those cars by spending $131 million on the purchase, according to the rocket company’s IPO prospectus.

Robert Shiller, the 2013 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, argues in his book Narrative Economics that shared narratives about a company’s future, even false ones, can influence its valuation more than tangible data, especially those narratives about its future. And Musk has built several narratives around himself: the image of a superhuman technological genius who is never wrong and has an inhuman work capacity, and that of a futuristic visionary who brings scenarios and technologies straight out of science fiction. It is in several of those scenarios that Musk places Tesla as the narrative shifts with each earnings presentation.

In 2025, after losing leadership as the world’s leading electric vehicle maker to Chinese company BYD, Musk said Tesla should no longer be thought of as an automaker, nor even as a company devoted to energy storage and management (the area that performed best in 2025), but as a company devoted to artificial intelligence, the manufacture and operation of 100% autonomous robotaxis, and the mass production and sale of humanoid robots (called Optimus) that would assist people with everyday tasks. According to Musk, all of this would be ready by 2027. However, that narrative runs up against the limits imposed by reality.

The South Africa-born entrepreneur has been promising 100% autonomous driving since 2015, but, as Felipe Jiménez Alonso, professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid and deputy research director at the University Institute for Automotive Research (Insia), explains, although there are level-4 autonomy experiences — high automation in which the car may still be unable to cope with extreme weather or unexpected situations on the road — nothing indicates that level-5 fully automated driving will be achieved. Most Tesla vehicles currently have level 2, which requires constant human supervision. And regarding robotaxis, Waymo, a Google-related company with level-4 vehicles, is far ahead of Tesla in both number of cars and U.S. regulatory permits.

Stumbling blocks

As for domestic robots, those currently offered, such as Eggie or NEO, are remotely controlled by human operators in addition to performing a limited set of tasks. And the current leader in humanoid robots, Atlas, made by Boston Dynamics, is only sold for work in factories and controlled industrial environments, since interactions in a domestic setting involve too many variables for a robot to operate safely.

José Gabriel García, chief executive of PHI Agency and an expert in digital strategy, believes Musk’s promises need not be impossible and could eventually be achieved. But “large obstacles appear on the road” that depend not only on Musk’s capacity or narrative but on other factors such as computing power, energy limitations, and broader societal evolution.

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