Buy European

The thing about business though is you need to be able to derisk your business from a single failure point.

Tesla has a lot of battery cell supply and now production, and they use that supply chain to build commercial batteries. That's taking 1 thing you're good at (batteries) and then branching out to help build a new revenue business. Now their energy business is beginning to boom after years of being somewhat sidelined for cars, but now that cars are about to suffer heavily, the commercial battery business helps protect them.

FSD and Optimus are the same but aren't paying off yet. Let's say tesla never actually achieves FSD. They still end up with a very advanced level 2 system, that they could maybe pivot into a level 3 on highway only system. Or maybe it will only ever be a level 2 system.

But they've spent all these billions building the training network infrastructure (hardware and software), as well as seeing if they can maybe build specialized training compute to internally compete with NVidia (v2 of dojo might he competitive but we don't know yet)

But it's a shit load of money going into this, so how do you derisk it? You find another product to use the technology. Enter Optimus. It uses the same FSD computer. The same vision based neural network that billions of dollars has been spent training, in a less human saftey risk than cars (e.g a robot carrying a box is less risk than a car going 75mph and malfunctioning into a multi car accident) and aside from the hardware needing to be cost effective, should be a easier problem to solve with technology today. It also leverages Teslas' manufacturing capabilities.

So the "should just go back to cars" kind of mindset removes these kind of de risking side ventures.

I absolutely agree they should get back on the plan of more vehicles and less focus on robotaxi cars until FSD is actually real, but it's these side things that keep a business healthy and protected from something like 25% auto tarrifs.

Further, they have so much cash on hand even with these expensive ventures and are very profitable so using the cash to expand like this is prudent.

Edit: just another non Tesla example... Stellantis is partnering with Archer Aviation to help manufacture their eVTOL planes. They're using their manufacturing expertise to do something else which will help derisk them.

If he remained a major shareholder, I'd never buy one. And I'm in the market.