Tesla's Valuation is Almost Entirely Based on Elon's Word

Tesla is a car company, first and foremost. It's not a tech company, it hasn't done anything but build cars and car batteries. Despite this, for some reason, Tesla has managed to value itself like a tech company despite having done nothing to back it up. It all feels like empty promises. The Roadster still hasn't come out, Full Self-Driving doesn't feel like it's any closer to being real than it was 5+ years ago, and their entire robotaxi event never made a single value proposition.

It really just feels like Tesla's entire valuation is propped up solely by the words of Elon Musk. Whatever he says will cause the stock to grow or shrink, whether or not they actually deliver. Elon can say they're going to release the Cybertruck for something like $30,000 and the stock jumps up and, when they inevitably fail at releasing the Cybertruck for that price, nothing happens. The stock just goes up again.

This Now Extends to AI Funding

Sam Altman and all of the other AI CEOs can just kinda say that they're going to build a digital God and that suddenly makes their companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Somehow saying that you can build God soon when your current technology needs to write its own python code to count the number of Rs in "strawberry" means that your company is worthy of the largest funding round ever. I don't get it.

I'm not an AI skeptic, I've been following AI since I was in high school, I use it damn near every day to help me do my job, but I'm also not stupid. I understand its limitations, I also know how businesses run. I don't get what's going on here.

Closing Thoughts

For some reason we've now based the valuation of companies on delusions of grandeur. We're basing OpenAI's entire valuation on the words of Sam Altman, we're not basing it on the fact that people are tired of having AI shoved in their face, or the fact that general consumers don't actually know what the new AI features are supposed to actually do for them. I genuinely fail to see how the actions of these companies actually do anything to back up what they're saying. What are your thoughts here? Let me know over on Mastodon.