Tesla on course to go broke, just before Elon Musk kills us all | Opinion

I really and honestly can’t decide whether to be delighted or desperately worried about this, but a serious heavy hitter in the car industry is genuinely predicting that Elon Musk will leave the motoring industry as Tesla is crushed into irrelevance by Chinese rivals, causing the share price of the world’s most overvalued stock to be crushed to smithereens. 

I mean, if you’re the sort of person who agrees with comedian Meredith Casey, who has a wonderful bit about how women should stop having sex with people who drive Teslas, thus sending the company broke, this sounds like a future worth looking forward to.

Unfortunately, the wise man making these predictions, or wish casting them — Carlos Tavares, the CEO who helped to create the mega-company Stellantis but then resigned as its boss last year — predicts that Musk will leave the world of cars behind to work on things that sound far more dangerous.

READ MORE: Worried about climate calamity? Buy an EV. Right now | Opinion
READ MORE: Opinion: Why I’ll never buy an EV motorcycle, but 400 Aussies just did in a single day  | Opinion
READ MORE: Tesla’s Full Self Driving launching in Australia should have you quaking in your car boot | Opinion

“We can’t rule out that at some point, he’ll decide to leave the automotive industry to refocus on humanoid robots, SpaceX, or artificial intelligence,” Tavares said in an interview.

“Tesla’s stock market value loss will be colossal because this valuation is simply stratospheric. I’m not sure that Tesla will still exist in 10 years. It’s an innovative group, but they’ll be beaten by BYD’s efficiency.”

Indeed, no lesser a genius than Musk himself said last year that “Chinese car companies are the most competitive car companies in the world.”  And over the past five years Tesla’s share of the market in China has fallen from 16 per cent to just 5 per cent, as companies like BYD have started to give it a kicking by making cheaper, or at least more cost-effective, EVs.

Globally, BYD is now the biggest EV company in the world, taking a title that many saw as belonging to Tesla in perpetuity, hence its absurd share price (although, to be fair, its revenue was up 12 per cent, or $US28 billion, this year).

Any collapse in Tesla’s value, or Musk’s departure, would certainly be galling for those already angry at his proposed 10-year pay package from the company, which is reported to be worth $1 trillion (yes, TRILLION). That massive pay whack is tied to him raising the company’s already stratospheric value by 500 per cent to $8.5 trillion.

What is truly alarming is the idea of Musk turning his attention even more intently towards artificial intelligence. This is the man who warned that AI was like “summoning the demon” and was involved in the establishment of OpenAI, with Sam Altman, to ensure that artificial intelligence would be built in a way that benefited humans. 

Today, of course, OpenAI is a nakedly profit-seeking missile, valued at $500 billion, while its killer app, ChatGPT, is now being used by 800 million people a week. Turns out, the answer to Musk’s fears about AI killing us all was to give everyone their own demon.

If you’re not yet aware of the term P(doom), you should be, because this is the unfunny inside “joke” discussed by Silicon Valley types, and AI researchers in particular, and refers to any individual scientist’s personal feeling on the percentage chance that AI will develop super intelligence and then go on to wipe out the human race.

One leading expert, Eliezer Yudkowsky – who has written a quite depressing book called  If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies – quotes his personal P(doom) number as being above 99 per cent. Geoff Hinton, the Godfather of AI, has said his number is as high as 50 per cent, and Musk himself has admitted to a P(doom) variously between 10 and 20 per cent.

This has not, of course, stopped him working on his own strangely flawed AI assistant, Grok, which is reportedly a fan of Hitler and has already been banned in at least one country for its political views.

One interesting theory about Tesla’s share price is that it always been valued so highly not because of what its cars can do now, but because of the potential financial gusher that could be created if Musk ever gets his Cybercab plan off the ground. The idea of buying an autonomous car that can drive you around all day and then go out and earn money for you as a driverless Uber while you’re asleep sounds almost too fantastical to be true, and so far it has been.

As far as things that Elon Musk might do that  should keep you awake at night, top of the list must surely be his proposed “robot army”. So far, officially, Tesla is working on a robot called Optimus, a kind of household helper that could be a big money spinner.

But in a recent earnings call with investors, Musk, while trying to justify why he needs to be given $US1 trillion, said: “It’s just, if we build this robot army do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army? Not current control but a strong influence. That’s what it comes down to in a nutshell. I don’t feel comfortable wielding that robot army if I don’t have at least a strong influence.”

So, just to sum up, a man who believes that “humanity’s greatest weakness is empathy” is working on both the creation of super intelligent AI and a robot army. Is anyone seeing “Total Armageddon” on their bingo card?

Perhaps it would be better if he did just stick to building cars. And rockets that blow up a lot.