Tesla pivots to robots as investors question sales and soaring valuation

ELON Musk may be trying to pivot Tesla away from electric vehicles and toward humanoid robots, but to skeptical investors there's no hiding from its stagnating sales and eye-watering stock market valuation that leaves little room for error.

- BLOOMBERG

Eager to transform the carmaker into an artificial intelligence powerhouse, Musk earlier this month declared on his social-media platform X that about “80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus,” referring to the company’s robot initiative. But that’s for the future. In the here and now, Tesla’s 2025 earnings are expected to sink nearly 30%, while its robotaxi business is still years from turning a profit and faces stiff competition from Alphabet Inc’s Waymo, among others.

“You can pin any kind of valuation to robots at this point,” said Thomas Thornton, founder of Hedge Fund Telemetry. “The markets have not done an ounce of research on robots. What companies are out there? How good is their technology? How much are they making? And is there really a demand for personal robots?”

Tesla’s performance has suffered an industrywide EV slowdown that hit in 2023 and worsened in 2024. But at the same time, its stock has gotten increasingly expensive. The shares are priced at around 155 times the company’s earnings over the next 12 months, roughly where they were during the tech frenzy in 2021, the year Tesla’s market value first crossed the trillion-dollar threshold driven by optimism around EVs becoming mainstream.

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